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JULIE DE LESPINASSE 

FROM A WATKR-COLOUK SKETCH BY CARMONTELI.E IN THE MUSEE DE CHANTILLY 



A STAR OF THE 
SALONS 

JULIE DE LESPINASSE 

BV 

CAMILLA JEBB 



WITH TWENTY ILLUSTRATIONS 



New York: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
London: METHUEN & CO. 



First Published in 1908 

'of 



INTRODUCTION 

' I 'HE remarkable woman whose name stands on 
^ the title-page of this book has for several years 
exercised a singular fascination over me. My ideas 
concerning her, derived in the first instance mainly 
from the standard edition of her " Letters to Guibert" 
by M. Eugene Asse (supplemented by his little book, 
'* Mademoiselle de Lespinasse et la Marquise du 
Deffand," and by M. Charles Henry's " Lettres In^dites 
de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse), have been of course 
enormously enlarged since the appearance of the 
Marquis de Segur's invaluable study, " Julie de 
Lespinasse." It would be impossible for me ade- 
quately to express the gratitude which, in common 
with all admirers of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, 
I feel towards M. de Segur for the discoveries due 
to his research (notably as regards the de Vichy 
family and the Marquis de Mora), and also for the 
extraordinary insight and sympathy with which he 
has treated the whole subject. The subsequent re- 
publication of the " Letters," by the Comte de Ville- 
neuve-Guibert has been also an event of much im- 
portance, as this revised edition includes many passages 
previously omitted, and further, a considerable number 



vi A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of Guibert's replies, hitherto supposed to be irretriev- 
ably lost. 

I have ventured to hope that the story of Julie de 
Lespinasse, as seen by a biographer of her own sex 
and of different nationality, may reveal some aspects 
of the case hitherto unnoticed and not without interest. 
I have also endeavoured to give some idea of the back- 
ground against which she moved, and the strange 
transitional epoch in which her life was cast. 

In conclusion, I would fain offer my earnest thanks 
to M. Charles Henry, M. le Marquis d'Albon, M. le 
Marquis de Segur, M. Pierre de Nolhac and M. 
Gruyer for the personal kindness they have shown 
to me, a stranger and an alien, and the many valuable 
suggestions with which they have helped me. 

The principal authorities consulted, apart from those 
which I have already enumerated, are, the memoirs, 
correspondence and writings generally of d'Alembert, 
Madame du Deffand, Turgot, Condorcet, Marmontel, 
Diderot, Morellet, Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Argenson, 
Due de Lauzun, Horace Walpole, Duclos, Madame 
de Genlis, Madame Roland, Madame d'Epinay, 
Madame de Tencin, Madame Suard, Madame de 
Staal-Delaunay ; the works of the Brothers Goncourt, 
Taine, de Tocqueville, Sainte Beuve, Mr John Morley 
and Lady Dilke ; Grimm's " Correspondance Litter- 
aire," Mercier's "Tableau de Paris"; Restif de la 
Bretonne's "Nuitsde Paris"; Arthur Young's "Travels 
in France" ; John Hill Burton's " Letters of Eminent 
Persons addressed to David Hume" and " Life and 
Correspondence of David Hume"; " Lettres de 



INTRODUCTION vii 

Mademoiselle Aisse " (ed. Eugene Asse) ; M. de 
Segur's "Gens d' Autrefois " ; M. de Haussonville's 
"Salon de Madame Necker"; M. Guillois' "Salon 
de Madame Helvetius" ; M. Maugras' "Les comediens 
hors la loi " ; " Le President Henault et Madame du 
Deffand," by Lucien Perey ; " Les Encyclopedistes," 
by L. Ducros; "Mesdames nos Aieules," by A. Robida. 

c. J. 



CONTENTS 



dHAPTER 

I. A Strange Family History 

II. The Heroine as Instructress ,. 

III. French Country Life in the Eighteenth 
Century 



IV. A Notable Visitor 

V. In Convent Walls 

VI. An Opening in Life . 
VII. "The Flaunting Town" . 

VIII, New Friends .... 
IX. The Foundling of Saint Jean le Rond . 
X. Philosophy and Music . . . 
XI. The New Theology and its Exponents . 
XII. Outlaws by Profession .... 

XIII. The Root of Bitterness .... 

XIV. " Like Water sprinkled on the Plain " . 
XV. A New Departure 

XVI. The Destroyer of Beauty 
XVII. A Woman's Kingdom 



PAGE 
I 



28 

53 

65 
78 

89 

118 

133 

147 

161 

173 

187 
203 
214 



A STAR OF THE SALONS 



CHAPTER 

XVIII. Friends in Council 



XIX. The Coming of Love . 
XX. A Pinchbeck Hero 
XXI. The Tenth of February . 
XXII. For One, Despair ; for Many, Hope 

XXIII. Politics and a Pretty Wedding 

XXIV, Two Literary Enterprises 
XXV. Requiescat . . 

Index ....... 



PAGE 

238 
252 
266 

292 
306 
322 

339 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Julie DE LeSPINASSE .... Frontispiece 

From a water-colour sketch by Carmontelle in the Musie de 
Chantilly. 

FACING PAGE 

Mademoiselle de Bethisy et Son Frere . . . 22 

From a tainting by A. S. Belle in the Must'e de Versailles. 

La Marquise du Deffand . . . . .44 

By Forshel, after Carmontelle. 

La Duchesse du Maine (in childhood) . . . 48 ' 

From the painting by Mignard in the Musie de Versailles. 

Cardinal de Tencin , . . . , 62 y 

From an engraving after the painting in the Mus^e de Versailles. 

Les Chats de Madame du Deffand (showing her bedroom 

at St Joseph) . . . . . . 80 ' 

From an engraving by Cochin in the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

Le President Renault . . . . . 90 ' 

From a drawing in the Bibliothhjjte Nationale. 

Madame de Tencin ...... 108 

From an engraving in the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

D'Alembert . . . . . . .116 

From the original by Latour in the Musee de Saint Quentin. 
(Photo. Mons. f. E. Bulloz. ) 

Diderot . . . . . . .136 

After Greuze. 
Mademoiselle Clairon ..... 156 

From an engraving hy Cochin in the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

La Duchesse de Chatillon .... 182 

From a painting by Kosalba Carriera in the Louvre. 



xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Madame Geoffrin . . . . . .192 

From the portrait by Chardin in the Musee de Montpellier. 
{Photo. Mans. A, Giraudon.) 

La The a L'Anglaise Chez Monsieur le Prince de Conti 224 
From a painting by M. B. Ollivier in the Louvre. {Madame de 
Luxembourg, the Comtesse de Boufflers, the Prince de Conti, 
Pont de Veyle and Henault appear in this group. ^ {Photo. 
Mons. Neurdein.) 

Le Marquis de Condorcet . . . . .230 

School of Greuze in the Mus^e de Versailles. 

Le Comte de Guibert ..... 258 ' 

From an engraving after the painting by Lan^on in the Biblio- 
theque Nationale. 

Turcot . . . . . . .288' 

From the painting in the Musee de Versailles. 

Mademoiselle de Courcelles, afterwards Comtesse 

de Guibert ...... 300' 

From the painting by Greuze. {Photo. Mons. Braun, Clement 
et Cie.) 

The Temple. Residence of the Prince de Conti, where 

Guibert gave readings of T/ie Constable . . . 316 

From a painting in the Musde Carnavalet. 

Marie Antoinette . . . . . . 320 ' 

From a bust (1774- 1779). ^^ ^^'-^ Louvre. 



A STAR OF THE SALONS 

CHAPTER I 

A STRANGE FAMILY HISTORY 

ON the 9th of November 1732, in a modest house 
at Lyon, long since demolished, there came 
into the world a little girl destined to be hereafter 
distinguished by a remarkable character and a career 
equally remarkable. No rejoicings welcomed her 
birth, for it was the direct evidence of her mother's 
shame, and public opinion, even in that tolerant age, 
required that so palpable a fact should be shrouded 
by a veil of decent mystery. 

The mistress of the house above-mentioned was 
by profession a midwife, while her husband practised 
the calling, then esteemed almost equally humble, of 
surgeon. The lady who, probably under an assumed 
name, had sought shelter and assistance from this 
respectable couple was Julie d'Albon, the heiress of 
an ancient and illustrious family represented at the 
present day by a lineal descendant of this very 
Countess. Her relations, naturally wishing to keep 
the ancestral estates which had fallen to her lot in the 
family name, had married her, at the age of sixteen, 
to the Comte d'Albon, her cousin. In spite of all the 
excellent arguments which are nowadays urged in 
defence of such fnariages de convenance, it is an in- 
contestable fact that this union was not a happy one. 



1 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

For over twelve years the young people lived an 
outwardly united life in the ancient feudal chateau 
of Avauges, which formed part of Julie d'Albon's in- 
heritance. They had four children (of w^hom only 
two survived), but soon after the birth of the last 
— the son and heir — the Comte d'Albon quitted 
Avauges, never apparently to return, and withdrew 
to his native town of Roanne, where he spent the 
rest of his life. 

The causes of this rupture are matter of conjecture 
only, but it seems almost certain that, up to that time, 
the balance of wrongdoing had lain on the side of 
the man. Otherwise it would be difficult to account 
for the humble and effaced role which he henceforward 
sustained. He long survived his wife, but seems to 
have been all along ignored by his children, who were 
left in their mother's care. The French husband was 
then armed by law with formidable powers against an 
offending wife. If legal evidence of her faithlessness 
was forthcoming he could imprison her for life in a 
convent and appropriate all her money, subject to a 
bare maintenance of some jfifty pounds a year. Such 
rigour was indeed little in accordance with the spirit 
of the age, but the statutes authorising it remained 
in force, and instances of their revival occurred at a 
much later period than that at present in question. If 
the Comte d'Albon did not, in the light of his wife's 
subsequent behaviour, attempt even to deprive her of 
the guardianship of the children or the control of her 
estates, of which she was left mistress, it must have 
been from a consciousness that his own conduct had 
not been such as would bear the light of publicity. 

The exact nature of the conditions under which the 
young couple parted is also uncertain. Divorce, in 



A STRANGE FAMILY HISTORY 3 

the proper sense of the term, was then unknown 
in France, as in other Roman Catholic countries. 
D'Argenson, it may be observed, though a student 
of law, appears surprised at discovering its existence 
amongst Protestants. Judicial separations, on the con- 
trary, were in this century of common occurrence, and, 
as in a modern police court, were nearly always 
at the suit of the wife, the husband being very 
properly disqualified as a plaintiff by the ample, or 
rather excessive, privileges which he already possessed. 
La demanderesse en separation was a prominent figure 
in the social life of the period. At one time as many 
as three hundred women were carrying on suits of 
this kind — an enormous proportion when we remem- 
ber that they must have been drawn wholly from the 
upper and middle classes of society. These revolting 
wives — who, it may be observed in passing, had 
generally excellent reasons for their revolt — were 
required by decorum to retire while their suits were 
pending to certain convents set apart to receive them, 
and lived by no means in conventual seclusion, re- 
ceiving visits from their friends and lawyers, and 
spending hours daily in court, for it was a point of 
honour for each to be present at the cases of all 
the others. 

Judicial separation was of two kinds — of the per- 
son and of property. The first, which sanctioned the 
living apart of the couple, was granted only in case of 
great cruelty or extraordinary profligacy on the side 
of the husband. The second, by which the wife was 
given control of her own money, could be obtained if 
sufficient evidence were produced to show that the 
husband was likely to squander her fortune. This 
kind of separation could be arranged privately, and 



4 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in some cases the marriage contract was from the 
first drawn up on the basis of separate estates, 
much as, in England, a woman's dowry was sometimes 
settled on her for her own use. Probably this last 
arrangement was that which existed between the 
Comte and Comtesse d'Albon. At anyrate it is 
almost certain that there could have been no formal 
" separation of the person," or Madame d'Albon would 
not, as she at one time did, have contemplated the 
possibility of legitimatising the daughter born some 
years after she had ceased to live with her husband. 

We must not judge the conduct of the young wife, 
thus left practically a widow, by the standard of our 
own times. From the point of view of most of her 
contemporaries it was inevitable that a woman in such 
circumstances should take a husband informally. It 
would seem, however, that she must have acted with 
unusual caution ; for, though all her acquaintance knew 
that she had a lover, nobody knew who he was, and 
it is only quite recently that his identity has been 
revealed by the patient research of M. de Segur, 
concerning whose discovery more will be said pres- 
ently. When her legitimate son, Camille, was six 
years old, Madame d'Albon gave birth to another boy, 
of whom scarcely anything is known. He was educated, 
apparently, in a monastery at Lyon, ,and in due time 
professed as a monk. Twenty months later was born 
his sister, the subject of the present memoir, whom a 
far different lot awaited. 

The little girl was baptised the day after her birth 
in a neighbouring church — still, we believe, existing, 
at Lyon — and received the names of Julie-Jeanne- 
j^l^onore, being entered in the parish register as the 
child of "Claude Lespinasse, bourgeois de Lyon, and 



A STRANGE FAMILY HISTORY 5 

dame Julie Navarre, his wife." Both of these are 
purely fictitious personages, the name of Lespinasse 
being derived from one of the d'Albon estates. Of 
the years which immediately followed little is known 
beyond the fact that Madame d'Albon could not bring 
herself to renounce her daughter as she had, in effect, 
renounced her son. The childhood of the little Julie 
was almost certainly passed in the ancient chateau of 
Avauges, which stood on the road between Lyon and 
Tarare. A photograph now before me represents the 
chateau as it has existed since 1765, a long three- 
storeyed edifice, in the style of Louis XV., but at the 
period of the story at which we have so far arrived 
the site was occupied by a genuine feudal castle, with 
moat and battlements ; a fitting abode for a family 
which traces its descent backward through at least 
eight centuries. Hither, no doubt, the girl was 
brought after a year or more spent, as was then the 
custom even with legitimate children, in the cottage 
of some humble foster-mother. She was known 
always under the name of Lespinasse, and some 
transparent pretext of adoption was probably invented 
to account for her presence at the castle ; for just as it 
was necessary that her birth, though its approach was 
doubtless known to all the neighbourhood, should not 
take place at her mother's house, so the convenances 
forbade that she should be explicitly owned, though 
she might be treated as a daughter. 

Her early childhood was certainly happy. She was 
brought up with the same care as the two legitimate 
children, and probably treated with equal respect. 
But when she was seven years old an event occurred 
which was destined to exercise a most unfavourable in- 
fluence upon her future — the marriage, namely, of her 



6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

half-sister, Diane d'Albon, with Gaspard de Vichy- 
Champrond, a neighbour, and an old friend of the 
family. In order to explain how the fortunes of Julie 
were affected by this alliance it will be necessary here 
to consider the question of her descent on the father's 
side, a question much debated by the gossips of her 
own day, and in later times by litUratetirs who have 
interested themselves in her history. The secret, as 
has been already said, was preserved with such extra- 
ordinary care that, in spite of various obviously unten- 
able conjectures, it has remained unknown till within 
the last year or two, when the key to the mystery was 
found by M. de Segur in some hitherto unpublished 
manuscripts. The father of Julie de Lespinasse was, 
he thinks, no other than that very Gaspard de Vichy 
who, seven years after her birth, became the hus- 
band of her elder sister. The situation — a sufficiently 
familiar one to students of modern French fiction — is 
not pleasant to contemplate. We can imagine the 
suitor, level-headed, hard-natured, bent, at all costs, 
upon an advantageous establishment for himself, and 
careless of the means by which it is obtained ; the 
girl knowing nothing of the horrible complication, and 
fascinated, perhaps, as girls have often been fascinated, 
by the finished manners and ripe experience of a lover 
twenty-one years older than herself ; the mother heart- 
wrung, conscience-stricken, yielding reluctantly to the 
pressure brought from both sides to bear upon her. 
It must have been plain enough to her that no good 
could come of such a marriage for any of the persons 
concerned, but it is doubtful whether she at first fore- 
saw the full extent of the calamity thus entailed upon 
the poor child whose interests should have been as 
sacred to Gaspard as they were to herself. 



A STRANGE FAMILY HISTORY 7 

This strange and sinister son-in-law was fully re- 
solved that the portion of his wife, the only legitimate 
daughter, should not be diminished by any provision 
for her unacknowledged sister. He offered a deter- 
mined resistance to every measure attempted for this 
purpose by Madame d'Albon. Diane, who had now 
been instructed of the true state of affairs, seems, to her 
credit, to have proved herself less obdurate, but her 
husband's authority was with her supreme, and she 
dared offer no resistance to his will. His influence 
extended even to Camille d'Albon, who had at first 
shown much affection for his little sister, but was now 
led to consider his own rights as incompatible with 
hers, and hence to take sides against her. It was, 
doubtless, in the hope of placing the girl on a footing 
which should render her independent of these hostilely 
disposed relatives that her mother conceived the idea 
of obtaining recognition for her as a lawful descendant 
of the house of d'Albon. In view of Madame d'Albon's 
long alienation from her husband, this seems to us 
moderns an utterly chimerical project, but there was 
not much limit in those days to the things that could 
be accomplished by people of rank and wealth, and 
that the plan had every chance of success is proved 
by the intense alarm which it inspired in Gaspard de 
Vichy. So fierce was the opposition made by him, and, 
at his prompting, by his wife and brother-in-law, that 
the Countess found herself obliged to give way. 

All that she ventured openly to do was to insert 
in her will a clause bequeathing to " Julie-Jeanne- 
Eleonore Lespinasse, daughter of Claude Lespinasse 
and Julie Navarre," an annuity of 300 francs, with 
a further legacy of 6000 francs to be paid in case 
she either married or entered religion. Bequests 



8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of a like nature, but somewhat smaller in amount, 
were also made in favour of Hilaire- Hubert, Julie's 
brother by the full blood, who two years after the 
death of Madame d'Albon did in effect "enter re- 
ligion," and presumably received the scanty portion 
assigned him in that event. But the daughter, who 
had been from infancy her mother's companion, could 
not be so lightly set aside as the son, whom she had, 
perhaps, never seen since his birth. Unknown to 
Gaspard and Camille, the Countess had contrived 
to lay by a large sum of money in a desk in her 
room, and on the eve of her death, which occurred 
about a year and a half after the above will was 
drawn, she called the girl, then aged fifteen, to her 
bedside, and secretly gave the whole amount into 
her possession, with injunctions to keep it for herself. 
The poor child, unfitted alike by age, temperament 
and education for that grim "struggle for existence" 
which was henceforth to be her portion, handed over 
the money intact to her brother^ Camille (who made 
no hesitation about taking it), and never benefited to 
the extent of a single penny by her mother's dying gift. 
It was a dreary prospect indeed which lay before 
the hapless girl, now worse than orphaned. She had 
been passionately attached to her mother, whose 
name, as she wrote long afterwards, was "dear and 
venerable" to her. It would indeed appear from 
many strong indications that the terms on which the 
two stood to each other were far more affectionate 
and familiar than was then usual between parents 
and children. Instead of being banished, like the 
great majority of her contemporaries, to a convent 
school, she was brought up at the side of her mother, 
who herself superintended her education, and "en- 



A STRANGE FAMILY HISTORY 9 

deavoured by double tenderness to make amends for 
having bestowed upon her the fatal gift of life." 
Evidently the years passed brightly and peacefully 
for the child until the ill-omened marriage of Diane 
and the unrelenting attitude of Julie's father reduced 
Madame d'Albon to an extremity of distress which 
she was unable to conceal from the innocent object 
of her anxiety. She terrified the little girl by vague 
hints concerning the dire misfortunes awaiting her 
in the future, the cruel enemies besetting her path ; 
"often," we are told, "she bathed her secretly with 
her tears." The effect upon a sensitive and affection- 
ate child might easily be imagined, even if we had 
not the after-testimony of Julie herself. "Strange 
irony of fate ! " she writes, not long before her death, 
to her friend Condorcet, " my childhood was rendered 
unhappy by the very care and affection which in- 
creased my sensitiveness. I was familiar with terror 
and dismay before I had the power of reasoning or 
understanding." There would be the less to distract 
her from these gloomy impressions, as Camille, who 
had made her his pet and playfellow, must now have 
left Avauges to enter the army, and she remained 
alone with her mother in a solitude only broken by 
occasional visits from country neighbours or expedi- 
tions to the provincial town of Lyon, where Madame 
d'Albon had a house. 

Up to the time of her mother's death, the girl, 
beyond a general conviction that there was something 
very much wrong indeed, does not seem to have 
understood the true nature of her position. She must 
certainly have been far from realising the state of 
Ishmael-like isolation to which she was now reduced 
when she confided to her treacherous brother the 



lo A STAR OF THE SALONS 

money designed to secure for her some measure of 
Independence. Perhaps it was the reading of Madame 
d'Albon's will, perhaps the uncompromising explana- 
tions of her relatives, which revealed to this petted 
daughter of a wealthy house the existence of poverty 
and humiliation awaiting her. Perhaps, as one auth- 
ority asserts, she did not, even then, understand that 
she had any other cause for sorrow than the sufficient 
one of having lost her best friend. However this 
may be, her anguish of grief aroused the sympathy 
of Diane de Vichy, who had come, of course, to attend 
her mother's funeral. Even Gaspard's heart was 
touched with something like pity for the daughter 
whom he had done his best to render destitute. They 
proposed to the desolate girl that she should make 
her home with them, an offer which she accepted 
almost with joy — she had indeed no other resource. 
Camille, though much hardened by contact with the 
world, had not as yet lost all affection for his young 
sister, but, as a soldier and a bachelor, it would have 
been impossible for him, even had he been so minded, 
to take her personally under his protection. So late 
as 1760, Madame de Genlis notes that it was not con- 
sidered decorous even for the wives of officers to 
accompany their husbands when on military duty. 
Garrison towns had then a bad name ; to make them 
taboo for all women of good reputation was not perhaps 
the best expedient for improving it, but for a girl of 
Julie's age to break through such a convention was 
plainly out of the question. Accompanied therefore by 
her sister and her brother-in-law, whose true position 
towards herself was still probably unknown to her, 
she set out for their country house at Champrond in 
the adjoining province. 



CHAPTER II 

THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 

CHAMPROND, the estate from which Gaspard 
de Vichy derived his title of count, was situated 
on the northern frontier of the old province of the 
Lyonnois, in what is now the department of Saone-et- 
Loire. The chateau belonging to the estate exists no 
longer, but Monsieur de Segur has published, from 
manuscript sources, an interesting description of it 
dating from 1735, or thirteen years before Julie de 
Lespinasse took up her abode there. Its large square 
tower, its moat and drawbridge, indicated the troubled 
period in which it was originally built, while the two 
great terraces facing north and south respectively, the 
flower-garden, the aviary and the park with its wind- 
ing rivulet and long alleys of hornbeam are suggestive 
of later and more peaceful times, and of such scenes 
as we find idealised in the pictures of Watteau. 

In surroundings of this kind were passed the next 
four years of Julie's life. The duties which occupied 
her were, in the main, those of governess to the 
children of Gaspard and Diane. The position was 
not, in those days, one of much dignity or importance, 
and was, in fact, not widely differentiated from that of 
an upper servant. The modern distinction between 
a gouvernante, who takes general charge of children, 
but does not necessarily teach them, and the institutrice 
or instructress proper, was sometimes, as we learn from 
a passage in Madame Roland's memoirs, theoretically 



12 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

recognised, but in practice we find the two constantly 
confounded, and the one office was scarcely held of 
more account than the other. Setting aside royal and 
semi-royal households, the most aristocratic specimen 
of a private governess whom I can remember having 
come across in the memoirs of that period is Mademoi- 
selle de Mars, the organist's daughter, who taught the 
harpsichord to F6licit6 de Saint-Aubyn, afterwards 
Madame de Genlis, and read novels with her when 
their history book proved too intolerably dull for the 
taste of either — a trait which recalls Becky Sharp at 
Queen's Crawley. To be relegated to such a position, 
therefore, might well, to a girl brought up as Julie had 
been, have seemed a bitter humiliation, but it is prob- 
able that she was never actually governess en titre, 
and from a playmate grew insensibly into a teacher. 
Perhaps it was from motives of delicacy that her sister 
and brother-in-law forbore, as it is pretty certain they 
did, to accentuate the change by any offer of payment. 
In the spring of 1748, when Julie became an inmate 
at Champrond, the family circle consisted of Gaspard J 
himself, his wife, and two sons, aged respectively eight " 
and five, and in the month of May of that same year 
a third child, a girl, was born. For the eldest of the 
three, Abel, an amiable boy, who grew up into a 
worthy and kind-hearted man, Julie had a strong and 
entirely sisterly affection. Their friendship continued 
unbroken until the end of her life, and she always 
looked back upon his companionship as one of the few 
cheerful memories associated with her stay at Cham- 
prond. The second brother was of a less lovable 
character, and indeed turned out badly, and died, not 
much regretted, at the age of twenty-seven. The 
little girl above-mentioned survived her birth for some 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 13 

years, but did not live to grow up. That the relations 
of all three with their aunt, or rather their elder sister, 
were of the pleasantest kind is proved by the anguish 
of regret with which, as Madame du Deffand declares, 
they witnessed her departure four years later. We 
know that she was always fond of children, and it was 
only natural that, in her loneliness and desolation, she 
should find comfort in the society of these young 
brothers, who were nearer her own age than the 
mistress, much more the master, of the house. Their 
liveliness and caressing ways would contrast pleasantly 
with the cold and constrained attitude maintained 
towards her by their parents. Her complaints of the 
unhappiness which she suffered at Champrond never 
refer to what the ill-used governess of Jane Austen's 
and Charlotte Bronte's days was wont to style the 
"drudgery" of teaching. Probably she was too 
intelligent to make it a drudgery either for herself 
or her pupils. 

In this age, when the number and nature of the 
items which should be, must be, or can be included in 
the school time-table provides an eternal theme for 
discussion, we are naturally curious to know what 
were the "subjects" in which Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse instructed her young relatives. Latin was 
then, as now, " a necessary part of every gentleman's 
education." Indeed, if we may judge by Monsieur 
d'Epinay's naive remark that his son must learn Latin 
but need not understand the authors he reads because 
"they lead to nothing," the attitude of the French 
eighteenth-century parent towards classical instruction 
would seem to have borne a touching resemblance to 
that of the British paterfamilias in our own times. 
The teaching of Latin is certainly much simplified 



14 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

if we start on both sides with a clear understanding 
that it is not necessary for the pupil to have any com- 
prehension of what he reads ; but even under these 
conditions it is not likely that Julie would have been 
considered equal to the task. Had she possessed the 
slightest smattering of classical lore, Guibert in his 
eulogium written after her death, would scarcely have 
omitted to mention so extraordinary a circumstance. 
Frenchwomen do not often learn Latin now, but a 
Frenchwoman who did so then was considered by 
herself and all her social circle a marvel and a portent 
indeed. Madame Roland has acquired the reputation 
of a knowledge of the "learned laneuaofes" on the 
score of some intermittent lessons in Latin grrammar 
bestowed on her in childhood by a priest uncle. 
Madame de Genlis, though, like Miss Edgeworth, she 
affected to depreciate the study of classics, is equally 
careful to inform the world of an equally scrappy 
course of instruction imparted by her brother's tutor. 
Madame du Chatelet, the "sublime Emilie " of 
Voltaire, was really at the age of fifteen capable of 
construing Virgil with more or less correctness, but 
then Madame du Chatelet was the wonder of her day, 
the typical new woman whose example was held up as 
an awful warning to any misguided girl who might 
show a tendency to become savante. 

The classical part of the young de Vichys' education 
would, therefore, probably he confided to some hanger- 
on, of the secretary or almoner order, such as was 
nearly always to be found in the houses of the 
nobility. Considering the number of eminent men 
who, at some time or other in their lives, occupied 
a position of this sort, it might be supposed that the 
presence of such inmates would contribute to the 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 15 

enlivenment of the household generally and detract 
from the deadly dullness of life in a remote provincial 
chateau. But the Marmontels, Grimms, and Rous- 
seaus were, of course, the rare exceptions amid a 
crowd of fusionless pedants like Linant, the semi- 
clerical tutor of M. d'Epinay's son, or insolent 
upstarts such as the footman promoted to be 
governor to the young Duke of Lauzun. 

In modern languages Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
was certainly better versed. About twenty years later 
than this time, she writes to ask her friend, David 
Hume for a presentation copy of his history, with 
a view, she says, to improving her knowledge of 
English ; and an Italian poem copied in her own hand 
has been found among her posthumous papers. But 
we should be judging that century by the standard of 
this in supposing that her acquaintance with either of 
these tongues dates back so far as her residence at 
Champrond. Even for the daughters of the most 
exalted houses, languages formed no part of the 
educational curriculum, whether at school or at home. 
So late as the sixties Madame de Genlis, who, after- 
wards did much both by preaching and example, to 
raise the linguistic standard, mentions as a remarkable 
fact that one lady of her acquaintance knew English. 
She, herself, learnt both that language and Italian 
(German was not thought of) after her marriage. 
Madame d'Epinay, writing in 1771, marks the inaugu- 
ration of the new era by observing that women are de- 
barred from learning Latin and Greek by their "duties, 
occupations, and weakness," and hence restricted to 
French, English, and Italian literature — the conse- 
crated apportionment which, even in England, retained 
its force down to the end of the early Victorian period. 



1 6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

But Madame d'Epinay herself, so far as I am aware, 
knew no English, and though she began Italian under 
the tuition of a masculine admirer, by way of some 
consolation for her husband's neglect, she made no 
great progress in it. Madame Roland, again, whose 
girlhood fell in the last half of the eighteenth century, 
was supposed to know some English, but as she read 
all her authors in translations it would not appear 
that her reputation was in this respect much better 
founded than in regard to her classical attainments. 
In this matter of languages France, as Madame de 
Genlis remarks, was much behind England, where 
many families kept French governesses, whereas, even 
towards the end of the century, it was regarded as a 
startling innovation to employ Englishwomen to teach 
French children colloquially. 

Arts d'agrdtnent, on the other hand, were a recog- 
nised factor in the education of every young lady and 
of many young gentlemen ; even girls of the bourgeois 
class were taught the harpsichord, singing, and above 
all dancing, as a matter of course, either at their 
convent schools or at home (drawing, as savouring 
of masculinity and opening up a vista of possible 
studies from the nude, was less in favour). When the 
home was in a lonely country-house beyond the ken 
of visiting masters, resort was sometimes had to 
resident teachers of music and dancing. Thus 
Felicite de Saint-Aubyn, besides the instructions of 
Mademoiselle de Mars, had for some time the benefit 
of daily tuition from a professional dancer of inebriate 
tendencies retained by her parents in their chateau. 
We do not know whether that care for her daughter's 
education which, according to Guibert, distinguished 
Madame d'Albon was carried to this extent. In any 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 17 

case, the seed could not have fallen on exceed- 
ingly fertile soil, for Julie was not apparently, in the 
technical sense of the word, "accomplished." Later 
in life she showed a strong and intelligent interest in 
music, especially opera, but we do not hear that she 
herself either played or sang. It would be more 
strange if she had not learned to dance, for the 
dancing-master was the autocrat of the century, and 
society was quite ready to endorse his opinion of his 
own art as by far the most important element in a 
liberal education. But at the height of her social 
success in Paris we do not know that she was ever so 
much of a ball-goer as that other mistress of a literary 
salon, Madame Necker, who danced, says Marmontel, 
badly, but with great spirit. On the whole, it does 
not seem likely that she imparted "accomplishments" 
to the youthful de Vichys. 

In our endeavour to reconstruct the schoolroom 
studies at Champrond, we are thus thrown back upon 
the three royal R.'s, which were then regarded with 
less familiarity and more respect than is consistent 
with modern habits of thought. We do not, for 
example, consider it as a great achievement for either 
a lady or a gentleman to be able to read aloud correctly 
and distinctly, yet it is said that there were not above 
fifty persons in Paris who could do it, and the Due 
de Lauzun assures us that to the possession of this 
exceedingly rare accomplishment, acquired from his 
footman - tutor, he partly owed his favour with 
Madame de Pompadour. In this branch of educa- 
tion, Julie de Lespinasse was certainly a qualified 
instructor, as we know that her reading afterwards 
found rather too much favour with the fastidious 
Madame du Deffand, who sometimes insisted that it 



i8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

should go on all night. Writing stood on a still 
higher level. The nun who held the proud position 
of writing-mistress at the convent frequented by 
Madame Roland in her girlhood considered herself 
particularly well educated because she "wrote a 
beautiful hand, embroidered superbly, taught ortho- 
graphy well, and was not unacquainted with history ! " 
The writing of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, if not 
good, is at least legible and cultivated, and her 
orthography conforms to the arbitrary rules of 
grammarians rather than to her own sense of the 
fit and beautiful, which is by no means always the 
case with the ladies of her time. Madame de Genlis, 
with neither surprise nor dismay, records that her 
brother's wife, a girl of the highest birth and most 
eminent piety (equally eligible, in fact, as regards both 
gear and grace), never learned to spell till after her 
marriage. With arithmetic Julie at some time of 
her life certainly gained a sufficient acquaintance 
to keep her yearly expenditure within her yearly 
income — the most useful purpose, perhaps, which that 
science can, for most of us, be made to serve. 

Geography was even less a matter of course than 
spelling. Madame de Genlis herself, la fde de la 
pddanterie, was unacquainted with it till long after 
she was grown up, and so was her mistress, the 
Duchess of Orleans. Both had a course of lessons 
from a jeune personne ires instrtnte, and felt that they 
were doing great things. History, in the shape of 
some such colourless abridgement as that which 
drove Mademoiselle de Mars and her pupil to the 
pages of fiction, may have been studied at Cham- 
prond, and anecdotes of elevating character and 
rather doubtful authenticity, such as those of Regulus 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 19 

or of Alexander and the physician Phihp, would be 
impressed upon the minds of the pupils, and by them, 
perhaps, retailed for the benefit of their admiring 
elders. The claims of literature would be acknow- 
ledged by committing to memory some fable of La 
Fontaine, or perchance some tirade of Racine, and 
these also we can imagine the children repeating 
amid the applause of an adult audience. Yet this 
stimulus may after all have been wanting, for the 
fashion of subjecting children to informal examina- 
tions for the entertainment (?) of their parents' friends, 
though almost universal by the end of the century, 
had scarcely as yet superseded the older fashion of. 
ignoring them altogether. The catechism, too, which 
was taught in most families by a waiting-maid, in 
some by the governess, rarely indeed by the mother, 
may well have been undertaken by Julie. The future 
"sceur Lespinasse," of the Encyclopaedic Church, 
teaching her scholars to enumerate the nine orders 
of spirits who make up the celestial hierarchy, is a 
piquant spectacle for the imagination. 

It was for "the care bestowed upon the education 
of her daughter," however, that Madame de Vichy 
professed herself especially grateful to the young- 
instructress. As the said daughter was only four 
years old when Julie left Champrond her duties must 
in this instance have been rather those of a nurse 
than of a governess. For the first year of its 
existence, nevertheless, the poor little creature would, 
in the common course of things, be handed over 
almost unconditionally to the tender mercies of a 
foster-mother. Even in those exceptional cases where 
a child was not exiled to the nurse's cottage, it was 
not usual for the mother to attempt any unladylike 



20 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

interference with her methods. The infancy of 
Madame de Genlis was passed under her parents' roof, 
but her mother neither knew, nor cared to know, that 
the woman upon whom she devolved her own responsi- 
biHties was physically incapable of fulfilling them, 
and that the luckless baby was in consequence 
reared upon " miaulee " — i.e. rye bread passed 
through a sieve and moistened with wine and water. 
In the houses of the women themselves such 
deceptions were even more certain to escape 
unnoticed, and deaths amongst children "at nurse" 
were, accordingly, of frequent occurrence. Madame 
Roland lost six infant brothers and sisters, and herself 
only survived because, contrary to the usual custom 
of her parents, some attention was bestowed upon 
the selection and supervision of the woman to whose 
charge she was committed. 

The starvation thus begun in infancy, was, it is 
to be feared, often continued throughout childhood. 
The Due de Lauzun in his memoirs tranquilly 
remarks : " Like all children of my age and rank, I 
had the prettiest possible clothes for going out, but 
at home I was naked and dying of hunger." This, 
he adds, was from carelessness, not cruelty. The 
distinction between cruelty and such carelessness is 
rather too subtle for ordinary minds, but in some 
families the starvation was on principle. Rousseau 
solemnly declares that the grandson of the Marechal 
de Luxembourg was slowly starved to death in 
accordance with the atrocious regimen of the fashion- 
able physician Bordeu. It was heartrending, he 
says with genuine feeling, to see this heir of a wealthy 
family eagerly devouring a piece of dry bread, when 
he could get it. The Due de Richelieu's son, de 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 21 

Fronsac, fared better than this. He might have as 
much dry bread as he Hked for his go4ter, or after- 
noon repast, but the supplement of cherries was 
strictly forbidden. Madame de Genlis, in her book 
on education, allows her imaginary pupil, Adele, 
nothing but dry bread or fruit for her gouter, and 
then, in serene unconsciousness that she is demonstra- 
ting the complete failure of her system, frankly relates 
how Adele, for once permitted to eat what she liked, 
straightway made herself sick by consuming "ten 
tartlets, six meringues, and two cups of ice-cream," 
an achievement at which the children of these 
degenerate days might well gasp in admiration. 
Where underfeeding is, there may greediness almost 
invariably be found. 

Starvation or semi-starvation was not the only evil by 
which the eighteenth-century child was from its cradle 
beset. Swaddling was then the fate of all French 
babies, and this custom was of singular comfort to the 
nurse, by enabling her to disembarrass herself of her 
charge when she felt disinclined to attend to it. Rous- 
seau has seldom employed his fervid eloquence to 
better purpose than in the indignant passage which 
describes the poor, helpless mummy of a baby hung 
on a nail to keep it out of the way, unable to move, 
unable to cry, purple-faced, suffocated, "crucified."^ 
Our national conceit is gratified by his remark that 
England was, in this respect, far more civilised than 
France. But the awful corps de baleine, which for girls 
succeeded to the swaddling clothes, and from which 

' Judging from a picture, "^« Clou" which appeared in the Salon, at 
Paris, some twenty years ago, this atrocious practice has not yet disap- 
peared, though the children of the peasantry are now the only sufferers 
from it. 



22 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

there was no escape till death, was, he assures us, even 
more a British than a French institution. In both 
countries there brooded over the minds of parents a 
constant terror of deformity for their children, especially 
their daughters, a terror unknown to, inconceivable by, 
the generation which writes letters to the daily papers 
lamenting the deterioration of the race. Swaddling 
in one country and tight lacing in both were the means 
employed to counteract this terror, and with such ex- 
cellent results that amongst the girls who survived the 
treatment a "crooked figure" (a term now almost 
meaningless for us) seems to have been nearly as 
common as a smallpox-pitted face.^ Remembering 
how Madame de Sevigne commends herself for the 
trouble she takes to improve her infant grand- 
daughter's figure (a phrase which makes us shudder 
when we reflect what it implies), we are tempted to 
inquire whether "the care bestowed upon the educa- 
tion " of Mademoiselle de Vichy extended to details of 
this kind. It is, unhappily, not impossible. In later 
years, Julie de Lespinasse was, for good and for evil, an 
ardent admirer of Rousseau, but at this date " Emile " 
was still unwritten, and swaddling bands and tight 
stays were accepted almost without question, as matters 
of necessity.^ 

Even apart from tight-lacing, the clothing of girls 
up to the two last decades of the century was not 

^ The memoir writers and essayists of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, both French and English, constantly allude, in the most matter- 
of-fact manner, to women afflicted with deformity — including ladies of the 
highest rank, from royalty downwards. 

^ From the enumeration of her wardrobe it appears that, at the time 
of her death, she possessed fourteen pairs of stays made of dimity, and 
seemingly innocent of steel and whalebone. This style of corset dates 
from about the year 1770, and the invention was due to the influence of 
Rousseau. 




GIRL AND BOY OF THE PERIOD 
(MADEMOISELLE DE BETHISY ET SON FRERE) 

KKOM A V^mTING BV A. S. BE..E IN THE M.S^E D. VKKSAZU.ES 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 23 

such as tends to a high physical standard. The poor 
little wretches were dressed exactly like miniatures of 
their mothers — trains, paniers, high-heeled shoes and 
all. Even their very aprons (pitiful approximation to 
that admirable institution the pinafore) were hollow 
mockeries of transparent tulle embroidered with flowers, 
and quite as perishable as the silk frocks they were 
supposed to protect. For the credit of human nature 
we must hope that for everyday life in the country a 
compromise was sometimes adopted, such, for example, 
as the habit de Savoyarde mentioned by Madame de 
Genlis, which, though far too much ornamented for 
comfort, had the grand merit of clearing the ground. 
Old and shabby dresses would also be worn out in the 
peaceful seclusion of a rural home, and we all know 
that old clothes, whatever the wickedness of their 
original nature, do not involve the misery inseparable 
from new ones. But, whenever the children were on 
view, full dress was de rigueur. Madame de Genlis 
has described with equal humour and sympathy the ex- 
periences of a girl dressed for a children's ball, with pow- 
dered hair built high over an enormous pad, feathers 
two feet in length, stays tightened to suffocating point, 
and a panzer of steel and horsehair so heavy as to 
make dancing a difficult achievement, and set on her 
way with the parting injunction, "Take care you don't 
smudge your rouge, or toss your hair, or crumple your 
frock, and be sure you enjoy yourself" 

It was not in the nature of things that girls so 
dressed, for there was no essential difference between 
the costume de pro7nenade and the costume de bal, 
should accomplish much in the way of outdoor exercise. 
But it is a curious fact that the boys, who, though they 
wore their petticoats much longer (in both senses of 



24 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the word), than is now usual, did ultimately get rid of 
them, do not appear to have been in this matter con- 
spicuously superior to the girls. The ancient game of 
barres — i.e. prisoners' base — was, certainly, even in 
this century, an institution at some schools, but we 
learn from Rousseau, who much deplores the circum- 
stance, that the manly sports of tennis, mall and foot- 
ball were considered too severe for boys, and that they 
were thus in general, like girls, thrown back upon the 
ever popular volant. Nor was shuttlecock the only 
recreation common to the youth of both sexes. One 
of Lancret's pictures represents a group of girls and 
boys, the girls with their long skirts deftly tucked up, 
playing le jeit des quatre coins [Anglice, Puss in the 
corner) ; and the evergreen blindman's buff and other 
like diversions which the modern British boy learns, 
from his preparatory school onwards, to despise as 
childish, were scarcely considered derogatory even by 
youths in their teens. They were also much in vogue 
at convent schools, and consequently the girls there 
educated were, says Jean- Jacques, far healthier than 
those brought up at home, where jumping, running, 
and shouting were generally barred. 

In the face of this community between the sexes 
in the matter of recreation we are naturally chary of 
accepting Rousseau's dogmatic assertion that, in his 
time, the distinction between the eternal feminine and 
the equally eternal masculine displayed itself from the 
cradle in the voluntary adoption of toys of different 
species — dolls for girls, for boys the much wider field 
covered by drums, tops, and miniature carriages. 
Such of us as prefer the use of our eyes to any train 
o{ a priori YQ2iSomv\g are aware that the girl baby of 
our own days is by no means averse to appropriating 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 25 

her brother's playthings, and that till the rigid con- 
ventionalities of scholastic tradition have cast their 
blighting influence on his ingenuous nature, her action 
in this respect is by him fully reciprocated. Doubt- 
less the same law prevailed, perhaps to an even wider 
extent, in the eighteenth century. Those high-com- 
plexioned wooden dolls must often have enjoyed the 
(perhaps doubtful) benefit of masculine nursing, and 
the "horses" who drew those little carriages would 
sometimes be of the less worthy gender. For this 
last inference, indeed, we have the testimony of a 
picture by Coy pel referred to in '* La Femme au 
XVIII'^^siecle." 

When the boy grew to manhood, however, he 
could, if so disposed, turn his attention to the afore- 
mentioned pursuits of football, mall, and tennis, all of 
which were denied to the girl. We certainly hear at 
a somewhat later date of professional female tennis 
players in Paris, but their way of life was scarcely 
such as to confer respectability upon this innovation. 
Riding, again, was more or less a necessary accom- 
plishment for gentlemen, but it did not become the 
fashion for ladies till much nearer the end of the 
century. A few women of the higher class rode and 
even hunted — some, like Madame de Genlis, from 
genuine love of the exercise, and some because in 
very aristocratic circles it was the correct thing to 
do ; and when we consider the side saddle and riding 
habit of the period we are forced to the conclusion 
that either they must have been extraordinarily 
courageous, or, what is more probable, that la chasse 
was in point of difficulty a very different affair from 
modern fox-hunting. We have no evidence that 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was a horsewoman, but 



26 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in those days of exceedingly bad roads it may some- 
times have happened that, like most dwellers in the 
country, she was obliged to ride, in Hibernian phrase, 
whether she could or not. We remember the artless 
comment of Madame de Staal when compelled to 
travel upon horseback : "If I had been required to 
mount a dromedary, I could not have been more 
terrified," and her frank confession that her seat in 
the saddle was " rather that of a bundle than a human 
being." 

Shooting as a feminine pursuit was, like hunting, 
not altogether unknown. Curiously enough, it was 
the favourite recreation of that most gentle and 
womanly of women, Mademoiselle Aisse during her 
visits to the country, though we hear that a certain 
gamekeeper made objections. It is not likely that 
Julie followed her example. So far as outdoor amuse- 
ments are concerned, she was probably in no way 
above the ordinary level of her contemporaries. One 
country pleasure, however — bathing — she must almost 
certainly have enjoyed, for it seems to have been the 
fashion with Frenchwomen during the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries to bathe whenever they had 
a river at hand. The letters and memoirs of the 
period are full of references to this practice, and 
painters frequently show us groups of ladies playing 
about in some river much as girls do now at the sea- 
side. The dress in which they are represented differs 
certainly from the modern bathing-costume, being 
sometimes a chemise and sometimes considerably less, 
though in such details French artists, then as now, 
probably drew on their imagination. But though 
bathing was fashionable it did not involve a know- 
ledge of swimming. Rousseau caustically remarks 



THE HEROINE AS INSTRUCTRESS 27 

that this art could be learned for nothing, and was not 
therefore deemed worthy to be included in the educa- 
tion of a gentleman. Scarcely any boys of the better 
class, he says, were taught to swim. It is a safe 
inference that the same rule applied ct fortiori to girls. 
But the whole question of country occupations and 
amusements requires to be treated more at large, and 
will be fully dealt with in the ensuing chapter. 



CHAPTER III 

FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

THE landed aristocracy of eighteenth-century j 
France fall readily into two main divisions — the I 
families who, from want of means, were compelled to I 
live all the year round in the country, and those who 
practically spent their lives in Paris or its immediate 
neighbourhood and regarded their estates as places 
of exile in which, from motives of economy, it was 
necessary to pass a few weeks or months annually. 
That the country might, for its own sake, be prefer- 
able to the town was scarcely an idea seriously enter- 
tained by either class before Rousseau had made it 
the fashion ; and, in the picturesque language of the 
brothers Goncourt, "the century was then very old." 
When Julie de Lespinasse lived at Champrond the 
preference for the "city square" was so open and 
unabashed that those who could not afford a migra- 
tion to Paris often spent the winter at the nearest 
large provincial town. We shall perhaps find that 
this frankly Philistinish attitude admits of some excuse 
if we endeavour to realise what was then meant by 
country life in France. The Parisian "smart set," 
of whom something will be said in a subsequent 
chapter, simply continued their ordinary routine of 
amusements so far as the altered conditions would 
admit, but the case was very different with the stay- 
at-home class, in which Gaspard de Vichy may be 
reckoned. He certainly paid an occasional visit to 

38 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE 29 

Paris, with a view to keeping in touch with his sister, 
Madame du Deffand, who had a Httle money to leave 
and no child to inherit it, but on these occasions his 
household, with the exception of Madame de Vichy, 
remained behind in the peaceful — and economical — 
seclusion of Champrond. 

The monotonous dullness of that seclusion may 
be easily imagined if we bear in mind that the one 
ambition of all men and women possessing any 
abilities above the average was, by hook or by crook, 
to make their way, as Julie herself later did, to Paris.^ 
Those who were left would be more or less the social 
and intellectual failures. To this basic fact we must 
add the insufferable pettiness produced by living in 
the narrowest possible of grooves, and moreover the 
difficulty of holding communication even with such 
neighbours as there were. True, this very difficulty 
lent a certain air of geniality to social intercourse in 
the provinces. We often read of surprise visits paid 
to distant chateaux, of unskilled riders taking, like 
Madame de Staal, their lives in their hands in order 
to traverse roads impassable by wheels, of large parties 
arriving uninvited in confident expectation of the hos- 
pitality never denied, though sometimes, necessarily, 
of the most impromptu kind. It sounds idyllic, but 
some of us perhaps know by experience that it is 
quite as possible to be bored over the most scram- 
bling picnic as over an elaborate dinner-party, and 
that an uncongenial acquaintance is not rendered 
more attractive by being compulsorily converted into 
a room-mate. As a certain set-off we must reckon 

1 " I hope for your sake and your wife's that you will not spend this 
winter in the country," writes Julie, many years later, to Abel de Vichy. 
" The evenings are very long there." 



so A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the more frequent opportunities afforded by an un- 
sophisticated country district of encountering curious, 
and sometimes ludicrous, characters. Such was that 
modern Bluebeard, the dS^e noire of Felicite de Saint- 
Aubyn's childhood, who enticed numbers of workgirls 
to his house and there secretly murdered them ; such 
the crotchety old lady who would not have her fish- 
ponds drained, and flooded out the neighbours in 
consequence ; and such, though belonging to an 
earlier generation, that eccentric Mademoiselle du 
Plessis, who enlivened the solitude of Madame de 
Sevigne. But few of us are sufficiently cynical to 
enjoy always laughing at our company, and our 
interest in human nature is seldom so strong: that 
we prefer originality to good breeding in those with 
whom we are obliged to associate. 

The general impression which we receive of pro- 
vincial society as reflected in the writings of those 
endowed with sufficient ability to describe it is one 
of intense dreariness. Imagine the tedium of three 
successive hours spent at table, and that, too, during 
that most unsociable period of the day which synchro- 
nises roughly with the modern luncheon hour ! Like 
Mr Smith, in ** Evelina," one inquires what hosts and 
guests could have found to say to one another, and 
the answer is not readily forthcoming. Even at a 
much later date, Arthur Young was astonished by 
the scarcity of newspapers in French country districts, 
and the extraordinary ignorance and apathy displayed 
by the inhabitants with regard to public events. Books 
of one sort or other were not uncommon as a part of 
the furniture of country houses, but we may safely 
assume that the average provincial gentleman's library 
was not constantly recruited with supplies of modern 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE 31 

literature. The expedient of discussing the latest 
novel (for the latest novel was even then an in- 
stitution) would be impossible with ladies who had 
not yet advanced beyond the interminable romances 
fashionable with an earlier generation. Sport of 
some kind or other the country certainly did afford, 
though this topic of conversation would mainly be 
limited to the masculine part of the company, but the 
various duties of landlordism, the grand juries, 
quarter sessions, vestries and so on, which formed 
the serious occupation of the English squire, were, 
for reasons presently to be explained, almost non- 
existent for his French contemporary ; and to the 
honour of this last-named be it said that hard drink- 
ing, the English squire's usual recreation, never found 
much favour in his eyes. There would be nothing 
left for it but to talk gossip, a resource which, what- 
ever superior people may say, is by no means to 
be despised. The brilliant conversationalists of the 
eighteenth century, such as Julie de Lespinasse, never 
certainly fell into the mistake of despising it, but 
the gossip of a scattered rural neighbourhood, con- 
sisting as it mainly does of spiteful hearsays about 
people in a higher social position than the gossipers, 
is a depressing thing at best, and only welcome as 
a diversion from perpetual discussion of the weather. 

The longest dinner, however, must come to an end 
in time, and card-playing was then the order of the 
day. We should have expected this to be hailed as 
a relief from conversation under conditions such as 
those just indicated, but Parisians complained bitterly 
of the hours compulsorily devoted to old-fashioned 
games like Loto (discredited, it seems, in up-to-date 
circles) with the accompaniment of perpetual quarrelling 



32 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

over losses amounting to a few halfpence. In such 
pursuits the day wore on, for in that hospitable 
age visits were something like visits, and just as the 
modern "week-end" was represented by a stay of 
at least a month, so the afternoon call of the period 
began before the twelve-o'clock dinner and lasted till 
after supper. The proceedings would sometimes be 
varied by a "promenade," but as it was usual for both 
ladies and gentlemen to be dressed en grande tenue 
for their midday dinner, a custom by which, as Arthur 
Young acutely observes, the rest of the day was 
spoilt for outdoor exercise, this must generally have 
been limited to a stroll round the grounds, or perhaps 
a short drive. To English imaginations an additional 
horror is added to the picture by the absence of that 
blessed cup of tea which makes even boredom more 
endurable; the "five o'clock" being represented by 
a light gouter, which the prolonged dinner must, on 
gala days, have rendered an irksome superfluity.^ 

It was probably among the duties of Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse to assist Madame de Vichy in enter- 
taining her guests on occasions of this kind, and in 
such experiments on vile bodies she perhaps laid the 
foundation for the marvellous social successes of her 
after years. Her young charges would also be present, 
at least at dinner. For supper, which was seldom 
earlier than nine o'clock, the children sometimes sat 
up, and sometimes were served in their bedrooms. 
Breakfast then, as now, was an informal repast ^ of 
coffee or chocolate, these beverages having by this time 

^ Coffee immediately after dinner was, however, already an institution. 

^ Sometimes tea, as English fashions came into vogue. In country 
houses the family did sometimes meet for this meal, at the curious hour 
of nine a.m. 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE 2>?> 

established their place amongst all the well-to-do 
classes. The reign of Rousseau and sensibility was not 
yet, and children were still required to tremble, generally 
with excellent reason, in the presence of their parents, 
and, theoretically at least, to be seen rather than heard 
by visitors. It is refreshing to know that there were 
exceptions to this rule. In fact, we are repeatedly 
coming across instances of what, even to modern 
ideas, would appear excessive indulgence. As an 
example we may take the five-year-old boy who, when 
Madame de Genlis was visiting his parents, insisted 
on having her new hat, an exceptionally smart one, 
for a plaything, his fond mother only stipulating that 
he should ask for it nicely and do it no harm ! It is 
unnecessary to state that the hat could never be worn 
again. 

It is not likely that the children of Gaspard de 
Vichy, whose stern and imperious temper inspired 
even his wife with awe, were allowed to have much 
of their own way, so long at least as he was upon the 
scene. But the winter of 1849 was spent by him and 
Diane in Paris, while Julie remained at Champrond, 
in charge of her nephews and niece. One surmises 
that, to her as well as to them, the occasion must 
have been something of a holiday ; but that she 
managed to restrain the exuberance of her young 
pupils within some kind of reasonable limits, while 
still retaining their sympathy, is plain from the appro- 
bation with which she was at this time regarded both 
by parents and children. As she herself expressly 
says that she knew nothing of housekeeping till she 
lived in her own rooms in Paris, it is evident that she 
was not required to occupy herself in addition with 
domestic concerns, which would doubtless be left in 



34 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the hands of some functionary of the majordomo 
order. But to the difficult task of getting on with 
other people's servants she must even then have 
brouorht that admirable tact and consideration which 
in time to come caused her to be regarded rather as a 
protector than a rival by the long-established, highly 
favoured femme-de-chambre of Madame du Deffand. 
That this girl of seventeen could, in that profligate 
age, be safely left for some months to her own devices 
is, we may also remark, a fact which lends little 
countenance to the suspicions attached in after years 
to her name. Had her mind run upon lovers she 
would probably have found even a country neighbour- 
hood capable of providing some sort of specimen of 
that genus — such, for example, as the doctor's son who 
secretly courted Felicite de Saint- Aubyn and was by 
her contemned on account of his inferior social position. 
Remembering that passionate enthusiasm for social 
reform which afterwards formed so close a bond be- 
tween Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and the philan- 
thropic Turgot, we are tempted to inquire whether it 
may have been in the first instance inspired by 
her early opportunities for observing the condition 
of the peasantry and the relations existing between 
them and their seigneurs. Those relations were not 
generally characterised by deliberate cruelty on the 
part of the superior class, but they may fairly be 
said to have attained the climax of unreality. The 
whole fabric of society was tottering to that awful 
catastrophe in which it was so shortly to be over- 
whelmed. The feudal system, under which the noble, 
while often the oppressor, was always the protector of 
his people, had passed away. For a long time back 
the Central Government had been working to break 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE S5 

the power of the nobiHty and to deprive them of every 
function which gave them a raison d'etre and a pos- 
sibility of usefulness. The local government of each 
province was in the hands of an intendant appointed 
by the King. All public business, notably the levying 
of taxation, was conducted by him and by his official 
subordinates. The seigneurs were almost powerless, 
even to protect their dependants from unjust exactions, 
Their judicial power, once so terrible, was also much 
curtailed, and they themselves, finding the cost of 
administering justice beyond their means, were often 
willing, for a price, to abandon this part of their ancient 
rights. When we realise that their dealings with the 
peasantry were mainly reduced to the always unpopular 
processes of rent collecting and game preserving we 
cannot wonder if these last began to ask themselves 
whether landlords were not a superfluity ? The case 
was much aggravated by the systematic absenteeism 
of all landholders who could afford a house in Paris 
and a villa in the environs. The resident nobles 
were mostly poor, and often poor to an extent which 
we have difficulty in realising. They could do little 
to help their tenants. They were not, as a rule, in- 
human in their dealings with them — any more than 
was the average Irish landlord of the bad old times 
now gone. Like him, they often waited long and 
patiently for their rents, and like him were paid 
for their forbearance in the somewhat intangible coin 
of prayers for their eternal welfare. But sometimes 
they were themselves so poor as to be near to actual 
starvation, and the result would be a fierce, wild-beast 
struggle with the yet more wretched peasantry. 
Things were no better on the estates of the wealthy 
absentees, and here again we are reminded of Ireland, 



S6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

for the underlings left in charge behaved with a harsh- 
ness which their masters, if present, would seldom 
have countenanced, and of which they often expressed 
disapproval when individual cases were brought to 
their notice. 

But it is doubtful if even the exaction of rents 
produced so much bitterness as the preservation of 
game, and to this last rag of privilege the nobles 
clung with unabated tenacity, though no sort of justi- 
fication for it any longer existed. In feudal times 
the seigneur was supposed to enjoy /e droit de chasse 
in consideration of the services rendered by him in 
keeping down the wolves and wild boars, which were 
then a source of serious public danger. Some faint 
reflection of the old order may be traced in the wolf 
and boar hunts which were still sometimes held on 
Sundays in Brittany and other parts of France, and 
announced by the priest from the pulpit, the whole 
parish turning out after mass with their seigneur at 
their head. Madame de Genlis tells us of an old 
baron, her father's neighbour, who on one such 
occasion actually seized the wolf (a peculiarly fierce 
animal, suspected of madness) by the tongue, and held 
it thus till it was despatched by his followers. He 
lost a thumb in consequence, and went for a time 
in dread of hydrophobia, but we can understand that 
his tenants would see some reason in the seigneurial 
"right of the chase." Such cases were, however, the 
exception. Sport was, generally speaking, as artificial 
as in modern England, and, so far as regards human 
interests, very much more cruel. When we hear that 
in one district many sheep, varied by a child now and 
then, were carried off by young wolves purposely 
reared for the chase, we are inspired with a certain 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE 37 

contempt for poultry-stealing foxes. Game preserving 
was carried to an extent which nowadays seems scarcely 
credible. Sometimes the peasants were not permitted 
to perform the most urgent labours in their own fields 
between ist May and 24th June, lest they should 
disturb the young partridges. It was no uncommon 
thing for them to be forced to watch all night half the 
year through to protect their crops from winged and 
four-footed marauders whose lives were — to them — 
perforce sacred. Regulations so severe were of course, 
at all risks, often infringed, and desperate affrays be- 
tween poachers and gamekeepers were of frequent 
occurrence. 

Yet when we consider the atrocious system which 
laid the main burden of taxation on the class least 
able to bear it, we may well conclude that the un- 
happy people owed more of their misery to the 
Government than to their seigneurs. The corvee, or 
compulsory labour upon the roads, the taille^ supposed 
to represent the commutation for military service (the 
almost total exemption of the nobles being grounded 
on the feudal conception of them as the fighting caste), 
and the gabelle or salt-tax were the three principal 
exactions under which they groaned. There would be 
something ludicrous about this last-named imposition 
had its effects been less deeply tragic. Every person 
over the age of seven was obliged yearly to buy from 
the Government stores seven pounds of much-adulter- 
ated salt at thirteen sous the- pound — an enormous 
price when we consider the relative value of money 
then and now. So strictly was this law enforced that 
many persons are said to have suffered death for buy- 
ing no salt when they could not afford even to buy 
bread. At any moment an official might enter a 



38 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

house, demand the domestic salt-box, and having 
tasted its contents pronounce them too pure to be 
otherwise than contraband. He would next examine 
the pot of soup on the fire and the bit of bacon or salt 
pork hanging from the rafters (always supposing that 
the family was able to indulge in such luxuries), and 
if he saw reason to suspect any unorthodoxy in the 
seasoning the results might be very serious for the 
unhappy householder. 

The taille was, theoretically, proportional to the 
means of those who paid it, but this, apparently, was a 
rule which only worked one way, and that way against 
the contributor. If a man showed any sign of in- 
creased prosperity he could safely reckon on having 
to pay an increased taille. If an official, in the course 
of his inquisitorial visits to any district, noticed feathers 
lying about on the dust heaps he was sure to suggest 
to his superiors that the rateable value of a parish 
which could afford to consume its own poultry must 
be higher than had been supposed. One kind-hearted 
seigneur, distressed by the number of fires which 
occurred in the cottages on his estate, offered at his 
own expense to replace the thatched roofs by tiles. 
The peasants thanked him warmly for his good in- 
tention, but implored him to forbear, as the result 
would be an increase in their taille. Thus every 
effort at progress, whether in the improvement of land 
or otherwise, which might have been made by the 
better sort of either tenants or landlords was, throuo-h 
the suicidal policy of the Government, relentlessly 
crushed. 

It is no marvel that famine and disease were rife, 
and that the country absolutely swarmed with beggars. 
Severe laws were enacted against these last, but there 



FRENCH COUNTRY LIFE 39 

were two reasons why they should be imperfectly 
carried into execution. In the first place, all the 
prisons in France would not have held those statutably 
liable to arrest as vagabonds. In the second, there 
was no Poor Law to fall back upon, and even official 
hearts were not always so hardened as to be incapable 
of pity for a wretch who must either beg or starve. 
That such was the case can only be a matter for re- 
joicing, for France in the eighteenth century had not, 
like England in the twentieth, attained to a stage of 
development where mere almsgiving does more harm 
than good. Charity, even in the technical and limited 
sense of that noble word, must have shed a faint ray 
of light on many lives otherwise plunged in utter 
darkness ; must to some slight extent have softened 
the bitterness of hearts swollen by a sense of man's 
inhumanity to man. 

Charity represented by the bestowing of alms 
was more or less recognised as a duty by all the 
well-to-do classes. The clergy in particular were 
often, as became their profession, compassionate, but 
here again the curse of absenteeism prevailed. The 
superior ecclesiastics were all away in Paris ; the 
average country priest was a very poor man, and 
largely dependent upon his seigneur, who was often 
the patron of the parish church founded by his family, 
and expected even the hours of service to be altered 
to suit his convenience. It was scarcely to be hoped 
that men so circumstanced should have the courage 
to stand between the people and their lords. Yet 
neither would it be fair to assume that the nobles were 
wholly untouched by the spirit of charity. We often 
enoucrh encounter individual instances of kindness 
shown to the poor by them and the ladies of their 



40 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

families. But the utter inadequacy of such miserable 
tinkering, and the crying necessity for some measure 
of genuine reform, could scarcely fail to impress 
themselves upon an intelligent observer, and we may 
readily conjecture that it was so with Julie de 
Lespinasse. 



CHAPTER IV 

A NOTABLE VISITOR 

DURING the latter half of Julie's residence at 
Champrond her own troubles must have occupied 
her sufificiently to distract her thoughts from the 
miseries around her. The first two years seem to 
have passed, if not happily, at least in comparative 
tranquillity. But in the course of the third year things 
went exceedingly wrong. We may surmise that about 
this time the real facts concerning her relationship to 
the heads of the house first became known to her. 
To the end of her life she never forgot the horror of 
this revelation, nor the cruelty with which it was made. 
Doubtless, as the homely saying has it, there were 
"faults on both sides." We may well suppose that 
this sensitive, high-spirited girl was far from having 
yet acquired that marvellous tact and self-control 
which in after years distinguished her. It is likely 
enough that the inquiries prompted by growing 
anxiety to understand her position were framed in no 
conciliatory spirit, and the brutality with which her 
doubts were at last resolved may thus be partly 
excused. We can without difficulty believe that, on 
learning the truth, her agony found expression in wild 
reproaches against her unnatural father, thereby ex- 
asperating Gaspard's violent temper to a pitch at 
which all compunction was lost sight of We can 
imagine his savage retort that she was at least in- 
debted to him for the bread which she did not earn, 
41 



42 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

and the feverish defiant spirit in which her services to 
the children, hitherto a labour of love, would now be 
redoubled by her, as the only means of giving him the 
lie, and how one miserable scene would lead inevit- 
ably to another, till the most elementary courtesy or 
forbearance became an impossibility. 

That on the side of the de Vichys very hard 
things were said, and even done, there can be no 
reasonable doubt. We might hesitate entirely to 
accept Julie's statement to Madame du Deffand that 
she was "treated in the harshest and most humiliat- 
ing manner," " that violent scenes were of every-day 
occurrence," for this complaint was uttered while the 
wound was still fresh and sore, but the same re- 
servation scarcely applies to the confidences made 
more than twenty years later to Gulbert and 
Condorcet. " How cruel human beings can be ! " she 
writes, in reference to this period of her life. " Tigers 
are kind in comparison." And again : *' I experienced 
nothing but inhumanity from the very persons who 
were most bound to show me consideration." At the 
age of forty, we are seldom inclined, without some 
fairly strong reason, to throw upon others the un- 
divided blame for past unhappiness. 

Julie came at last to the conclusion that this state 
of things was no longer bearable, and determined to 
cut it short. It will be remembered that, by her 
mother's will, provision had been made for enabling 
her to enter either of the two callings alone recognised 
as offering an honourable and fairly comfortable exis- 
tence to women of the better class. But, with the 
small .dowry of 6000 francs bequeathed for this pur- 
pose, marriage, except with someone hopelessly her 
inferior in education and refinement, would have 



A NOTABLE VISITOR 43 

been out of the question/ For her entry into 
religion, however, this sum might have sufficed, and 
Madame de S^gur thinks that to "rehgion" her 
mind was for an instant turned. In any case it is 
certain that she wished, provisionally, to become a 
boarder in some convent, in full confidence that her 
brother, Camille d'Albon, would increase her annuity 
of thirteen pounds sufficiently to cover living ex- 
penses. *' He has always treated me like his own 
sister," she said about this time to Madame du 
Deffand. Besides, she was beginning to understand 
the obligation under which she had laid him by 
relinquishing her mother's dying gift. 

She communicated her decision to Madame de 
Vichy, by whom it was strongly opposed. Diane 
had some affection for her young sister, whose 
devotion to the children she also much appreciated. 
She pressed her to remain with such genuine kindness 
that Julie reluctantly consented to defer her departure 
for some months. It is noteworthy, indeed, that the 
girl's resentment seems to have been almost wholly 
directed against the master of the house. "You 
know my affection for your mother," she wrote, long 
after, to her favourite pupil, Abel ; " she has shown me 
a great deal of kindness in all sorts of ways." And 
in the same letter she uses expressions which seem to 
imply that Madame de Vichy's attitude on the ques- 
tion of the d'Albon inheritance was, in her opinion, 

^ Compare the case of another illegitimate child, whose parents, 
the Chevalier d'Aydie and the ill-fated Mademoiselle Aissd, hoped, 
with the much larger portion of 40,000 francs down, besides 400 of 
yearly income, to marry her very comfortably en province.. To save 
the necessary amount, both father and mother cheerfully submitted to 
many privations, for we must not be so unjust as to conclude, from the 
example of Gaspard de Vichy, that duty and natural affection were always 
disregarded in such cases. 



44 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

wholly attributable to Gaspard's influence. Here 
indeed, more than anywhere else, we may discern the 
bitter root of that daily wrangling so deeply resented 
by Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. It is perfectly cer- 
tain — chimerical as such an idea appears to us — 
that, in the opinion of the de Vichys, Julie's claim to 
a share in her mother's property could even yet have 
been made good in law, and equally certain that the 
same view was held by the girl herself, to whom 
it may have been suggested by some confidential 
retainer of the family ,in possession of the facts and 
attached to her interest. Hence, on Gaspard's part, 
the reluctance, arising from a better motive in his 
wife, to allow her to escape from his surveillance by 
leaving Champrond, and hence the perpetual suspicion 
and miscontruction to which her every action was 
now exposed. 

This most harassing existence had dragged on for 
more than a year from Julie's first declaration of 
her intention to seek an asylum elsewhere, when an 
event occurred which completely changed the current 
of affairs. Madame du Deffand, sister to the Comte 
de Vichy, arrived at Champrond on a visit. This 
remarkable woman, destined to exercise an incalcul- 
able influence upon our heroine's fortunes, was now 
(1752) in her fifty-fifth year. The fame of her intel- 
lectual powers, of her brilliant and scathing sarcasm, 
and her almost unrivalled ability as a conversationalist 
has endured down to our own day, yet to a modern 
reader the special interest of her career lies less in 
these things than in the peculiar facilities which it 
affords us for studying, as in an abstract, the social 
code of the society to which she belonged, with its 
strange tolerances and stranger reservations. 




THE MARQUISE DU PEFFAND 

BY' FORSHEL, AFTER CARMONTF.I.l.E 



A NOTABLE VISITOR 45 

She was born at Champrond, in the year 1697, but 
her upbringing was by no means that of a country 
girl. Like most young ladies of her time, she was 
early sent to a convent school, and only left it on her 
marriage to the Marquis du Deffand, in 17 18. To 
some compassionate souls this sudden plunge from 
cloistered seclusion into the difficulties of married life 
and the social maelstrom of the Regency might seem 
to furnish an excuse for much of what was to follow ; 
but they would be mightily mistaken in their conjec- 
ture. The fashionable Paris convent of that day (and 
such was La Madeleine du Traisnel where Marie 
de Vichy received her education) was no abode of 
Arcadian symplicity nor — to any alarming extent — of 
innocence. The heads of such institutions were 
women of high rank, who, despite their vows, had 
by no means renounced the world. Visitors, of both 
sexes, found their way frequently within the precincts ; 
exeats, for the pupils at all events, were easily pro- 
cured ; the flow of communication with the outside was 
uninterrupted, and the latest Court scandal was as 
likely as not to form the topic of conversation. Grimm 
relates an extraordinary but quite authentic story of a 
girl educated at the abbey of Panthemont, who, on the 
strength of the information gleaned through a school 
friend in touch with the highest circles, wrote a society 
novel which was recognised by the fashionable world 
as so inconveniently true to life that it procured for 
the author an imprisonment of some months in the 
Bastille. We may be tolerably certain that Mademois- 
elle de Vichy was no ingdnue of the innocent and 
"sheltered" type when she accepted the husband 
selected for her by family arrangement and^ — ^the 
marriage scarcely over — decided that, as a husband, 



46 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

he was impossible. For this prompt conclusion we 
cannot severely blame her. Monsieur du Deffand was 
not merely an uninteresting but an aggressively objec- 
tionable individual. "He was always taking trouble 
to make himself disagreeable " — a phrase which, 
unhappily, sums up the dealings of many better men 
with their womankind. Considerable latitude, besides, 
was allowed by public opinion to ladies unsatisfactorily 
married. It had its limits, however, and though these 
are, from the modern point of view, as difficult to 
define as it is for outsiders nowadays to determine 
the exact length to which a gentleman may go before 
being expelled from his club, the fact to be noted is 
that Madame du Deffand contrived to overstep them. 
It was then the heyday of the Regency, that time 
of mad reaction against the sombre restraint imposed 
by the uncrowned queen, Madame de Maintenon ; the 
period of flowing, voluptuous dress ; of all-night galas 
in the illuminated Cours la Reine and the Regent's 
Park at St Cloud, and of those unparalleled suppers at 
the Palais Royal, where the exquisite food was cooked 
in utensils of silver and the rich wines flowed with- 
out stint ; where duchesses sat pell-mell with opera 
dancers, and men of the vilest origin needed but to 
be witty enough, and shameless enough, to take their 
places among the highest in the land. As if to the 
manner born the young Madame du Deffand made 
her way at once to the very heart of this brilliant, 
fascinating, and inconceivably corrupt society. She 
had claims as a beauty no less than as a wit, and she 
soon won the favour of the Regent himself, who loved 
her faithfully for at least a fortnight, and, if scandal 
spoke true, had more than one successor in her 
affections. 



A NOTABLE VISITOR 47 

For a time all went gaily, but it seems that, for 
ladies at anyrate, public opinion drew the line at 
Palais Royal suppers and St Cloud fetes. While the 
Duke of Orleans lived, this was of little importance 
to Madame du Deffand, but when his death had 
broken up the circle of which she was a distinguished 
ornament she found herself an alien and an exile in 
Paris, and realised that she had made a mistake. 
Being a very clever woman, she set to work to re- 
pair it by seeking a reconciliation with her husband. 
This last-named gentleman had long ago requested 
her to leave his house — an exercise of marital self- 
assertion which rather raises him in our opinion — 
but he turned a friendly ear to her overtures, and at 
first all promised well. For six weeks Madame du 
Deffand made herself as charming to him as she had 
been to the husbands of other ladies, but at the end 
of that period she found it impossible, in colloquial 
phrase, to "keep it up any longer," and the couple 
parted once more — this time, for good. 

Foiled thus in her first design for recovering re- 
spectability, the courageous woman had recourse to a 
second, not quite so strictly in accordance with the con- 
ventions of the present century. As a necessary, or 
at least a desirable, preliminary she obtained a judic- 
ial separation from her husband. On what grounds 
she did so is not quite clear, for she was certainly not 
the injured party, but as there was no objection on 
the part of M, du Deffand an amicable arrangement 
would be easily arrived at. Her next step was to 
take to herself a lover en litre ; for such a proceed- 
ing was, under certain conditions, held to confer 
respectability. These conditions were all fulfilled 
in the present case. Renault, the person on whom 



48 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Madame du Deffand's choice had fallen, and of whom 
we shall hear more hereafter, was a widower. She 
herself was as much unmarried as was possible in a 
country where divorce did not exist. Both cherished 
the intention of more or less settling down after their 
stormy youth under the Regency. The outward forms 
of decorum were by both scrupulously observed (they 
never, for example, lived under the same roof), and 
finally the fact that neither of them appears to have 
been at any time in love with the other imparted to 
their relations the particular shade of polite indiffer- 
ence appropriate to a genuine marriage comme il faut. 
Apart from this alliance "of convenience," Madame 
du Deffand's conduct really was, for the rest of her 
life. Irreproachable, and she succeeded in regaining a 
place in society, though the process was a longer one 
than we should have expected. 

Soon a small but choice company, the friends 
chiefly of Renault, gathered around the modest house 
in the Rue de Beaune where she had taken up her 
abode. Through Renault's influence also she gained 
admission to the so-called "Court" of Sceaux, where 
for many years her summers were regularly spent. 
The Due du Maine, the master of this semi-regal 
mansion, was a son of Louis XIV. and of Madame 
de Montespan. Ris wife, a Bourbon princess, and an 
attractive though scarcely a lovable woman, had the 
excellent quality, by no means rare in the great ladies 
of that period, of admiring talent in others. Rer 
house was recognised as a meeting-ground for all 
the most brilliant men and women of the day. It 
was at Sceaux that Madame du Deffand made 
the acquaintance of the celebrated mathematician, 
d' Alembert, hereafter to be known as the lover of Julie 




LA DUCHESSE DU MAINE (IN CHILDHOOD) 

FROM THE l-AINTING HY MIGNAKD IN THE MUS]4e DE VERSAILLES 



A NOTABLE VISITOR 49 

de Lespinasse. It was there that Voltaire composed 
some of his most admired stories, which he read aloud 
for the amusement of his hostess. His chere antie, 
Madame du Chatelet (whom Sainte-Beuve rather neatly 
calls a Hypatia minus the virtue and the beauty), 
pursued her scientific labours in the rooms reserved 
for her under the same hospitable roof, joining the 
gay assembly in the salons only when the evening was 
far advanced. Mademoiselle de Launay, the future 
Madame de Staal, was among the personal attendants 
of the Duchess. 

This miniature court affords us an excellent oppor- 
tunity for studying the manners and customs of the 
factitious country life represented by a few great 
houses. It differed widely indeed from the existence 
of the genuine country dwellers described in an earlier 
chapter, being in fact a mere reproduction of the 
fashionable Parisian routine, with all its pomp and 
glitter, its late hours, its sedentary amusements, and 
its quasi-intellectual activities. Card-playing, im- 
promptu verse-making, theatricals, literary readings, 
and, above all, ceaseless discussion of everything 
and everybody under heaven were the order of the 
day and night. The claims of rural surroundings 
were duly recognised by open-air fetes, boating 
expeditions, and even by some measure of sport — 
of the safe and picturesque order, we may surmise. 
This was the kind of existence which suited Madame 
du Deffand, which gave full play to her conversational 
powers, and to her gift of effective and ill-natured 
epigram, and she was long a persona grata at Sceaux. 

Her visits had, however, grown shorter and fewer 
for some years before the death of the Duchess du 
Maine, which took place in 1753. The truth was 



50 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

that, having gradually acquired a considerable number 
of interesting acquaintances, she was now meditating 
the grand move of setting up a salon for herself. 
Her husband had died in 1750. For the liberty thus 
regained she probably cared little, since neither 
Renault nor she had any wish to render their union 
more binding than it was. But her pecuniary re- 
sources, much straitened since the separation, were 
increased by Monsieur du Deffand's decease, a cir- 
cumstance which of course facilitated her scheme. 
But Fortune had a terrible blow in reserve for her. 
The new salon started on its career with every 
prospect of success, but its mistress meanwhile was 
struggling against one of the worst calamities which 
can befall a human being. She was going blind. 

Madame du Deffand was not in any sense what 
by the widest stretch of charity can be called a good ? 
woman, but the courage with which she endured this 
unspeakable affliction is beyond all praise. Scarcely 
a complaint escaped her. When remedy after remedy 
had in turn been tried, and all hope of recovery had 
vanished, she faced the awful prospect with unflinch- 
ing fortitude, resolved that life should yet yield her 
some satisfaction. She was determined not to 
abandon the social position which it had cost her 
so much effort to obtain, though the increased 
difficulty of maintaining it weighed heavily on her 
mind. It was while affairs were in this state that 
she came to pass a part of the summer with her 
brother, Gaspard de Vichy. According to M. de 
S^gur, this was her first visit to Champrond for nearly 
forty years. She much preferred country life as 
understood at Sceaux, or at one or two other semi- 
palatial establishments where she was now on visiting 



A NOTABLE VISITOR 51 

terms. In spite of Gaspard's attentions — possibly 
even on account of them — she was not attached to 
him, and though in after years a tolerably normal 
aunt to Abel de Vichy, she does not seem at this 
time to have taken much interest in him or in the 
other children. Yet some faint undercurrent of 
family feeling may have led her in this hour of 
trouble to turn for consolation to her old home, and 
she came prepared to be agreeable. She brought 
presents for everybody, and her servants (footman, 
majordorno, and maid, we may suppose) had strict 
orders to*give no trouble, and in fact, if we are to 
believe the testimony of their mistress, made them- 
selves more useful in the house than the de Vichys' own 
domestics — a touch quite in MadameduDeffand's style, 
and implying a sister's, and perhaps a sister-in-law's, 
contempt for the efficiency of the " four lackeys, two 
cooks, coachman and two postillions " of the chateau. 
But there was, after all, only one inmate of Cham- 
prond to whom she felt really attracted — the girl with 
the graceful figure and the expressive face, who looked 
so sad, and whose eyes seemed to fill unbidden with 
tears. She found Monsieur and Madame de Vichy 
fairly communicative on this subject, though how 
much they at first told her of Julie's real history is 
uncertain. But it is only doing them justice to say 
that, behind her back, they spoke very favourably of 
her. She was such a good girl, and so clever, and so 
kind to the children ! Only, added Gaspard, she had 
a deplorable fancy to leave her happy home with them 
and bury herself in a convent. For his, Gaspard's, 
part he did not much care, but it was a great grief to 
his wife. Madame du Deffand thought, or affected 
to think, that Julie's resolution was an unwise one, and 



52 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

undertook to remonstrate with her. She had taken 
a strong fancy to this girl, and, as nobody knew how 
to be more charming than she in such circumstances, 
she soon won the younger woman's confidence. The 
bitter tale of injury and insult was poured out to her, 
and it is a significant fact that she never seemed to 
doubt its substantial accuracy. For no possible con- 
sideration would Julie remain at Champrond. She 
had written to her brother, and he was to select a 
convent and arrange for her journey thither. Her 
new friend drew a discouraging picture of the dis- 
comforts attending convent life on an income of thir- 
teen pounds, but always received the same answer : any 
place on earth would be better than Champrond. 

Her departure was, however, delayed till the end 
of October, two months later than the beginning of 
Madame du Deffand's visit. During this time they 
were much together, and as Julie's charm and ability 
impressed themselves more and more on her com- 
panion, it occurred to her that here was the very 
person who, if transplanted to Paris, might help her 
in her social projects and at the same time be of 
singular comfort to herself in her darkness and lone- 
liness. This scheme went, at the time, no further 
than a hint thrown out at the last moment, and joy- 
fully received, and a promise to write to each other. 
When at last the carriage and the escort provided 
by Camille arrived, there was a leavetaking of unex- 
pected poignancy. Not only the children, but their 
mother and, niirabile dzcht, their father were dissolved in 
tears, and entreated the departing guest to abandon, 
even then, her resolution. Such was the fascination 
which this singular girl all her life exercised, even 
on those of whom she had most reason to complain. 



CHAPTER V 

IN CONVENT WALLS 

NATIONAL opinion in France has now decisively 
pronounced that convents are no longer a 
necessity, but it is obvious that there, as in other 
Roman Catholic countries, they formerly fulfilled a 
threefold purpose of great utility: first, as providing 
a career for superfluous women ; secondly, as educa- 
tional institutions, and thirdly, as safe and decent 
boarding-houses for the unprotected female. With 
regard to the first of these objects, it is sufficient here 
to observe that Montesquieu, in his " Esprit des 
Lois," represents the girls of England as being in this 
respect at a disadvantage compared with those of 
France, since they had no alternative to a possibly 
distasteful marriage ; and he thus accounts for the 
greater liberty of matrimonial choice which their 
parents were obliged in common justice to allow them. 
As for the second, the services rendered by the con- 
vent system in placing girls' schools on a far higher 
footing socially than was accorded them in England, 
are not generally recognised. Amongst ourselves, 
school-teaching was, up to a comparatively recent 
date, regarded as a profession even more unfit for 
gentlewomen than private governessing. It is only 
necessary to recall the contempt with which Jane 
Austen's " Emma" dismisses a priori the social claims 
of "a teacher in a school," though, where governesses 
in families like Jane Fairfax and Mrs Weston are 
53 



54 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

concerned, she is content to judge each case on its 
individual merits. In France, thanks to the convents, 
no such feeHng existed. Ladies of the highest rank 
might, and often did, "enter rehgion," and where their 
choice fell on a teaching order of nuns they might quite 
easily act as schoolmistresses. This was a fortiori 
the case with that numerous class of well-born women 
who took the veil because their impoverished though 
aristocratic parents could not afford to establish 
them otherwise in life, and who were naturally 
expected to supplement the small "dowry" they 
brought with them by some service to their convent. ' 
Even to teachers of a lower social grade a certain 
priestige was imparted by the religious habit, unat- 
tainable by women in Protestant countries, but closely 
resembling that conferred upon men by taking Holy 
Orders ; without which even Dr Arnold thought that 
it would be hard for a schoolmaster to get himself 
recognised as a gentleman. The same social superi- 
ority may be predicated of the pupils as of the 
mistresses. The greatest men in the land habitually 
sent their daughters to school, which, even now, is 
not the case in England. The^ two great Abbeys of 
Fontevrault and Panth^mont held a position which 
may without violence be compared to that of Eton 
and Harrow. The children of the greatest nobles, 
nay, princesses of the blood-royal, were among their 
scholars ; and though they lived in great state, each 
girl having her own maid and her private governess, 
all wore the^ simple school uniform and were proud 

1 According to the brothers Goncourt, the Convent of the Presentation 
was only a little below that of Panth^mont in importance. But Panthd- 
mont is most often mentioned in the memoirs of the period. 

2 An over and under skirt of brown stuff, the bodice, alas ! tight-fitting 
and well armed with whalebone, and a white cap edged with lace. 



IN CONVENT WALLS 55 

to be members of communities so distinguished. 
Next came the many less imposing but still aristo- 
cratic institutions, such as La Madeleine du Traisnel, 
mentioned in the last chapter, and then the long roll 
of quiet, unpretentious religious houses, where the 
young bourgeoises received their education. 

The mixture of classes, always a desirable object, 
must, by the French system, have been in some 
measure secured, especially when the distinction was 
one of money rather than of birth. Thus, Mademoiselle 
d' Albert, the girl-novelist, already mentioned, was a 
penniless gentlewoman admitted to Panthemont as a 
relative of the Abbess, and she became the familiar 
friend of Mademoiselle de Rohan, a daughter of one 
of the greatest houses of France, who stood by her 
loyally through the storm which followed on the 
libellous novel and procured her release from the 
Bastille and a pension. As between nobility and 
bourgeoisie, doubtless, the line of demarcation would 
be more strictly drawn, yet Duclos' lamentation that, 
in convent schools, birth was always favoured, and 
girls thus missed the wholesome experience some- 
times allowed to boys of seeing brains fairly pitted 
against blood, seems to show that the two orders were 
not irrevocably separated, and indeed in provincial 
convents such rigour would have been impossible. 
Thus, the gulf between girls of the upper and middle 
classes would be less pronounced than it then was in 
England. 

The educational activity of the nuns was not bounded 
by either of these classes. Secular schools for the 
children of the poor were certainly not unknown. Fdi- 
cit^ de Saint- Aubyn learned to read from the village 
schoolmistress, and the country schoolmaster buying 



56 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

a second-hand wig in Paris, wherewith to overawe his 
pupils on his return, is mentioned by Mercier as a 
famiHar figure of those times. But both in the capital 
and the provinces numbers of convents, besides their 
school for young ladies,^ had another for the daughters 
of the people, whom they taught gratuitously. It was 
at the little local convent of Bort that Marmontel's 
peasant mother received her education, such as it was, 
and he himself was by special favour admitted to learn 
his first rudiments there. 

It is, however, the third intent of conventual institu- 
tions with which we are here chiefly concerned, and 
the fiercest Protestant will not deny that in this 
capacity they supplied a want then much felt in 
England, where the ordinary lodging-house or inn 
was as unsafe for solitary women as in France, and 
yet no alternative was provided. How different, for 
example, might have been the fate of Clarissa, if she 
could have taken refuge in a convent, where she 
would certainly have been protected from Lovelace, 
and, having in view her grandfather's estate, probably 
from the Harlowes also! For a girl in the position 
of Julie de Lespinasse it was well to have such an 
asylum to fall back upon. But there was this draw- 
back, that though living in a quiet provincial convent, 
such as that selected for her at Lyon by her brother, 
was probably as inexpensive as anywhere, thirteen 
pounds a year were, as Madame du Deffand had 
warned her, insufiicient even there to live upon com- 
fortably ; for her expectations of a supplementary 
allowance from Camille were doomed to disappoint- 

^ As a testimony to the good work done by the rehgious orders in 
educating the people we may note that out of five servants mentioned in 
the will of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (1776) only one, a charwoman, 
was unable to sign her own name in receipt of the legacy bequeathed. 



IN CONVENT WALLS ^1 

ment. It is true that thirty years earlier we find a 
protegee of Madame de Maintenon received in a 
similar institution for half that sum, but food had 
grown dearer since then, and she was, moreover, only 
entitled to a room, without furniture, to buy which 
Madame de Maintenon allowed her fifty francs (;^2,). 
Besides, nobody's budget can be so framed as to include 
only the bare cost of living. In such surroundings 
the great clothes question would not, for a long time, 
become pressing, especially as we may hope that 
Madame de Vichy's "kindness" had extended to 
some reinforcement of her sister's wardrobe. But it 
was considered necessary at stated times (probably 
New Year) to give some presents to the servants of 
the community. And even under a scheme of things 
in which tea-shops and omnibuses have no place, 
nobody could exist wholly without pocket-money, if 
only to have a penny to bestow now and then among 
the piteous throngs of beggars who were everywhere 
in evidence. Manon Phlipon, the future Madame 
Roland, when reduced by a quarrel with her father to 
very similar circumstances, took the course of simply 
renting, for sixty francs yearly, a bedroom in the 
convent, and doing her own marketing and cooking ; 
her fare consisting chiefly of rice, potatoes, and haricot 
beans "dressed in a saucepan with salt and a little 
butter" — which last is a dainty dish enough. But 
Manon had been carefully trained by her mother to 
housekeeping, as housekeeping is understood in an 
establishment of one servant, an advantage not 
possessed by Julie, who could attempt no such heroic 
measures. We are not surprised to find that she was 
obliged to share a bedroom with one or more com- 
panions, an experience which may have led her to the 



58 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

opinion that there were other places of residence on 
earth not much better than the Chateau of Cham- 
prond. In the absence of definite information we can 
only wonder whether she was further reduced to take 
her meals in the bare barrack of a room which served 
as general refectory or could afford the more recherche 
table of the Abbess, to which that favoured section 
of the schoolgirls proper denominated in England 
"parlour-boarders" was admitted. 

We must not imagine that the average convent was, 
for lay persons, at all a duller place of residence than 
is the ordinary modern boarding-house, English or 
foreign, "for ladies only." There was, in the first 
place, a greater variety among the inmates : every age 
was there represented, from the little toddling child, 
whose parents were glad to be rid of it, to the grey- 
haired widow bringing with her the experience of a 
long life spent in the outer world. Between these two 
extremes were the schoolchildren under discipline ; 
the older girls who had "finished their education," 
but were left in this safe asylum till their relations 
could see some possibility of establishing them in life ; 
the single women of all ages who could not, with 
decorum, live elsewhere ; the young married ladies 
whose husbands were away on military service, and so 
on through an inexhaustible list of gradations. The 
chances of falling upon congenial company were thus 
obviously considerable, and we accordingly find that 
"convent friendships," often of a very enduring de- 
scription, play a large part in the memoirs of the 
day. 

Nor were pleasures of a less grave cast entirely 
lacking, As regards the nuns themselves their share 
of social gaiety would, save in a few communities of 



IN CONVENT WALLS 59 

the worldly and not over-respectable class already- 
glanced at, be limited to such innocent festivities as the 
ball given by Madame de Genlis, at which the sisters 
danced "gentlemen" with the pupils and enjoyed 
themselves immensely, or the garden fete so graphi- 
cally described in Madame Roland's memoirs, where 
all went merry as a marriage bell till the convent 
doctor, by special permission, appeared on the scene, 
and spoiled everything, by reviving the necessity for 
decorous behaviour ! But for adult boarders, and even 
for the elder schoolgirls, a good deal of contact with 
the outer world was possible. There was practically 
no limit to the number of visitors they might receive, 
though where these were of the wrong sex the inter- 
view had to take place across the "parlour" grating. 
But that this was no bar to friendly conversation, nor 
even to a certain amount of lovemaking, we have 
sufficient evidence. It was through the grille that 
the mother of Madame de Genlis first made acquaint- 
ance with her future husband, while he was visiting 
his mother, then a fellow-boarder in the convent where 
she herself had been placed by her relations in the 
vain hope that she might be induced to take the veil. 
Mademoiselle de Launay (Madame de Staal) had at 
least one gentleman friend who frequently visited 
her in her convent at Rouen and carried on a fairly 
lively flirtation with her across the dividing bars. It 
was, in fact, no uncommon thing for friendships of this 
kind to be formed in the first instance at the convent 
grate. The ordinary /<a:r/(92> was a long room divided 
down the middle by the grille, and several interviews 
often took place at the same time. It frequently 
happened that a visitor at one opening would become 
interested in the conversation being carried on at 



6o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

another, and ask his interlocutor for an introduction, 
and vice versa. The facilities thus afforded for 
pleasant and, we may add, innocent flirtation are 
obvious. This writer can testify that in the English 
ladies' colleges of the so-called nineteenth century, 
a much smaller measure of hospitality was extended 
to visitors of the opposite sex. 

During the daytime the pensionnaires seem to have 
gone in and out pretty much as they liked, children 
and young girls specially entrusted to the charge of 
the convent authorities being of course excepted. 
But it was necessary to be indoors by a rather early 
hour in the evening ; this at the Lyon convent being 
six P.M. That this rule, however, was not invariably 
enforced is plain from the example of Mademoiselle 
de Launay, whose patroness, the Duchesse de la 
Fert^, used often to take her out of her convent at 
Paris for the day and bring her back at very un- 
canonical hours. (The Abbess herself sat up to open 
the doors on these occasions, lest the community 
should be scandalised.) The same lady tells us that 
during her stay at the Rouen convent she often went 
to visit some former schoolfellows living near, and 
was usually escorted back by a common friend, of 
the masculine persuasion, who in the earlier stages of 
their acquaintance always took her home the longest 
way, but later showed the diminution of his affection 
by preferring a short cut. It is probable that this 
took place in the daytime and certain that the dis- 
tance to be traversed was, even at its longest, a short 
one. But, granting all this, a degree of freedom is 
indicated by the episode which compares favourably 
with modern French etiquette as applied to jeunes 
filles. 



IN CONVENT WALLS 6i 

It is likely enough that Julie would receive a certain 
number of invitations from old acquaintances made 
during occasional sojourns at Lyon in her mother's 
lifetime, and especially from the provincial noblesse, 
who came there, as they themselves had done, for a 
change from their lonely chateaux ; for we can scarcely 
suppose that even the more wealthy among the 
bourgeoisie of Lyon (already famed for the silk- 
weaving industry) would be on the Comtesse d'Albon's 
visiting-list. It is plain, however, that she derived 
no pleasure from any hospitality which may have 
been shown her in this manner. In after years she 
cherished an intense aversion, dating evidently from 
this period of her career, for the social life of pro- 
vincial towns, professing to find it far less supportable 
than the absolute solitude of the country. " I quite 
agree with the horror you express for a provincial 
existence," she writes to Guibert ; "but the provinces 
are not the country. I would rather live in a village, 
with none to talk to but the peasants, than enjoy the 
select society of a country town." In the particular 
case of Lyon, her antipathy was much increased, and 
perhaps originally produced, by the notoriety there 
attaching to the miserable story of her birth. It 
would almost seem as if she may have regretted 
the rural solitude of Champrond, but with the arrival 
of spring there came a pleasant interlude in her 
unpleasing existence. 

Madame du Deffand, finding her brother's house 
intolerably dull when Julie's presence was withdrawn, 
had remained there for only about another month — 
a trifling item in the visits of the eighteenth century. 
She went no further, however, than the town of 
Ma9on, where she spent the greater part of the winter 



62 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

at the house of a friend, and in the month of April 
she came for ten days to Lyon. JuHe, with whom she 
had maintained an assiduous correspondence, was the 
avowed object of this sojourn, and while it lasted the 
girl spent every day at her new friend's lodging, 
arriving at eleven and departing at six — these be- 
ing apparently the limits between which the convent 
gates remained open. On one of these days 
she encountered the Archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal 
de Tencin, who had come to pay his respects to 
Madame du Deffand, and who, at this last-named 
lady's desire, wrote a letter to the Abbess of Julie's 
convent requesting that this pensionnaire, in whom 
he was specially interested, might be allowed the 
luxury of a room to herself. As patronage was then 
all-powerful in France this recommendation was com- 
plied with, but the amelioration thus produced in the 
girl's position was but a small thing compared with 
the sweeping change contemplated by Madame du 
Deffand^ 

The project which, almost from the first, she had 
vaguely entertained of attaching the girl in some 
manner to herself took definite shape in a proposal 
that she should come to live with her as a companion. 
In Julie's position this was a most attractive offer, 
and she seems to have been at first almost intoxicated 
at the prospect. But it is plain that some qualms of 
doubt soon supervened. Her past experience might 
well make her shy of again accepting a dependent 
position of this sort, and though Madame du Deffand 
had been very kind to her she was too quickwitted 
not to have noticed signs of that imperious and ex- 
acting temper which made the brilliant Marquise a 
difficult person to live with. Still, the project was 





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IN CONVENT WALLS 6^, 

irresistibly alluring to her ; and, indeed, what else was 
she to do ? — continue her present pinched and object- 
less existence, or return, like the prodigal, to Cham- 
prond, where her old post still awaited her ? We can 
never hope to understand the women of that epoch 
unless we fully realise how utterly desperate was the 
position of all those who had not enough money to 
live upon and who were by circumstances, or their own 
reluctance, debarred from the two spheres already par- 
ticularised — matrimony and "religion." The chance 
of marriage had not come Julie's way, and if she had 
ever thought of being a nun she no longer regarded 
such a solution of the problem as possible. The 
thousand devices by which educated women now eke 
out a scanty income were then literally non-existent. 
There certainly were cases in which money was earned 
by writing plays and novels, and we hear of one lady 
who, having devoted her tiny capital to acquiring an 
imperfect knowledge of English, made a living by 
translating from that language. But for openings of 
this sort it was essential to be in Paris and to have 
influential patronage, without which such literature 
had small chance of a sale. Besides, authorship as a 
profession for women was then held in worse repute 
than the stage is now held amongst ourselves, and 
apparently with more reason. Visiting teaching was 
almost entirely monopolised by men. Manon Phlipon, 
when placed in much the same situation as Julie, did 
entertain some faint hope of getting pupils, but owned 
that this was extremely unlikely. Painting on satin 
and on fans, embroidery and suchlike minor arts were 
regarded as possible, though very doubtful, resources 
by many impoverished women. But Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse does not appear to have possessed any 



64 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

accomplishments of this kind.^ Her sight was far 
from strong, a circumstance which, combined with her 
love of reading, may have prevented her from acquir- 
ing the manual skill necessary for such occupations. 
In great families ladies were sometimes employed as 
governesses or secretaries, but here again it was 
necessary to have interest, and situations of this sort 
were regarded as scarcely one remove better than 
domestic service. For a girl in Julie's circumstances 
the chances were all against obtaining any situation 
half so promising as that offered by Madame du 
Deffand. Besides, she was still under the charm of 
the older woman's manner, enhanced by gratitude 
for the kindness shown her and compassion for the 
terrible affliction so courageously endured. Apart 
from all personal considerations, she might well feel 
it no unworthy lifework to devote herself to brighten- 
ing an existence thus shadowed. Her consent was 
therefore readily given, and Madame du Deffand, de- 
lighted with this reception of her offer, set to work 
with a will to carry the project into execution. Here, 
however, she was to encounter difficulties, partly fore- 
seen, but greater probably than she had anticipated, 
and the negotiations dragged on for another twelve- 
month before being finally completed. 

^ We never hear of her taking up any of the various kinds of fancy- 
work in vogue, not even the fashionable mania for " parfilage " {i.e. un- 
picking epaulettes, etc., stolen from male friends, for the sake of the gold 
thread), by which Madame du Deffand was carried away. In her portrait 
she is apparently engaged in knotting, a very popular pursuit for ladies, 
but this may be due to the painter's fancy. 



CHAPTER VI 

AN OPENING IN LIFE 

BEFORE receiving Julie as a member of her 
household, Madame du Deffand considered it ad- 
visable to obtain the consent of Camille d'Albon, who 
seems to have claimed the rights, while neglecting 
the duties, of guardianship to his unacknowledged 
sister. As she had no personal acquaintance with 
this gentleman she confided her intention to a friend 
of the family resident at Lyon, entreating her to act as 
intermediary. This lady received the proposition with 
a coldness tantamount to a refusal. Not content with 
assuming a neutral attitude, she straightway wrote 
to the de Vichys to acquaint them with the scheme 
which was on foot, thereby overwhelming them with 
consternation. Madame du Deffand had scarcely 
returned to Ma^on after her brief stay at Lyon when 
she received a letter from Gaspard, declaring that 
he would never consent to the proposed arrangement, 
and violently reproaching his sister for her treachery, 
as he considered it, towards himself. His attitude 
was in some slight measure due to a not unnatural 
resentment at having a useful member of his house- 
hold, whom he and his wife did not despair of re- 
covering, thus spirited away by the very person who 
had originally volunteered to persuade her to remain 
with them. But a far more powerful factor was his 
old fear concerning the d'Albon inheritance. Once 
well away from his guardian care, and safe in Paris, 
E 65 



66 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the headquarters of wire-pulling and patronage, 
what might not this brilliant and spirited girl, so 
eminently calculated to win friends, be able to effect 
in the way of asserting her claim ? No doubt he 
even suspected his sister of designing to support her 
new protegee as against the rest of the family. Julie 
was, after all, her niece, and she might even adopt her 
(she had in fact sent word to Camille that she promised 
to treat her as a daughter), and bequeath to her the 
money on which the de Vichys securely reckoned. 

It is very likely that the bond of relationship 
did, as M. de Segur suggests, count for something 
in the attraction felt by the childless Marquise for 
this worse than orphaned girl. But, whatever may 
have been her own testamentary intentions, Gaspard 
was quite wrong in supposing that she ever thought 
of embroiling herself with him and the d'Albons, by 
supporting any claim of the kind just alluded to. 
She had been prepared, however, for his attack, and 
was quite equal to the occasion. She replied to his 
charge of treachery by explaining that she did not 
recognise any right, either on his part or his wife's, 
over Julie de Lespinasse, who had left ^hem of her 
own free will and was certainly bound to them by no 
tie of gratitude. She did not consider their consent 
in any way necessary, and though she had been on 
the point of writing to acquaint them with the con- 
templated move (which by the way is rather doubtful), 
it was only as a matter of politeness. She even 
hinted that their fears concerning the inheritance were 
a mere pretext to cover their desire to be revenged 
on the girl for not having sufficiently appreciated 
the happiness of a home under their roof. She 
condescended, however, to combat their anxiety on this 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 67 

head, arguing that it would be really in their interest 
to get Julie away from Lyon, where, her parentage 
(on the mother's side at least) being well known, she 
was more likely to find sympathisers. At Paris she 
would be quite out of her bearings and Madame du 
Deffand undertook to keep a strict watch on her 
goings out and comings in. 

These representations had no effect upon the de 
Vichys, who continued vehemently to oppose the 
projected arrangement. Camille d'Albon, to whom 
his sister had written direct upon the failure of the 
first attempt to treat with him, was equally strenuous 
in his objections, which were grounded upon a similar 
apprehension. No decisive step could be taken till 
Madame du Deffaud had finished her round of country 
visits and returned to Paris. This she did not do 
till October of the same year (1753), and Julie mean- 
while remained in her convent ; for, though she had a 
standing invitation to Champrond for every summer, 
it is scarcely likely that she availed herself of it. She 
had ample time to reflect upon the project which had 
seemed at first so full of promise, and, though she 
was encouraged in it by the aged Cardinal Arch- 
bishop (who remained her friend and visited her 
sometimes at the convent grate), it evidently did not 
gain by closer contemplation. She wrote to Madame 
du Deffand confessing that the thought of Paris 
alarmed her. She was well accustomed to a dreary 
life of isolation and dependence in the lonely country, 
but would not the same isolation and dependence be 
harder to bear in the great world, and amid people 
enjoying a lot far different from her own? " I fear," 
she wrote, "that I might become so depressed that I 
should only be a burden to you, and you would repent 



68 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of having taken me." The infinite pathos of these 
words, which in their hopelessness born of a miserable 
experience remind us of Charlotte Bronte, had a 
strong effect on Madame du Deffand, and called forth 
a most kind and sympathetic reply. Indeed, if we 
would see this remarkable woman at her very best, 
it is at this stage of the relation with her young 
protegee. She gently rebukes the girl for supposing 
that the frankness with which she had expressed 
herself could give offence ; plain speaking on both 
sides was of all thing-s most to be desired. Then 
she proceeds to sketch the position which Julie was 
to hold under her roof in terms calculated to rob it 
of any terror on the score of neglect or slighting 
treatment : 

" I shall not tell anyone beforehand that you are 
coming to me. I shall tell the people who see you 
at the beginning that you are a young lady from 
my own province, in search of a convent in which to 
board, and that I have offered you a room till you 
can look round and find what will suit you. When 
strangers are present, I shall treat you not only with 
politeness but with ceremony, to make people from 
the first understand that they must do the same. I 
shall only explain the real state of the case to a very 
few friends, and after three, or four, or five months 
we shall both know how we suit each other, and we 
can then be franker with the world about our in- 
tentions. I shall take good care all along not to 
appear to be trying to force you upon people; what 
I intend to do is to make people anxious to have you, 
and if you know me you will have no fear that your 
self-respect will suffer in my hands. But you must 
trust to my knowledge of the world. If people knew 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 69 

from the first that you were come to live with me 
for good, I could not be sure (even were I a much 
greater lady than I am) of getting them to treat you 
as I should wish. Some might think you were my 
own daughter, others a mere humble companion, 
and unpleasant things might be said. The essential 
thing is to begin by establishing your position on 
the strength of your own merits, and this you will do 
easily with my help and that of my friends, but you 
must make up your mind to encounter some difficulties 
at the beginning. . . . You have plenty of brains, 
you can be lively, and you are not wanting in feeling. 
With all these good gifts you will be charming, if 
you only allow yourself to be natural." 

This letter must have done a o;ood deal towards 
overcoming Julie's reluctance. But the opposition of 
her family had some weight with her, and she had 
determined to settle the matter by forcing a decisive 
explanation with the Comte d'Albon who was shortly 
expected at Lyon. If he would guarantee her a 
sufficient allowance to live upon in comfort she would 
give up the Paris project ; if not, she reserved the 
right of doing what she pleased. Madame du Deffand, 
though this plan was contrary to her own wishes, en- 
couraged her in it by saying that the whole world 
would cry shame upon Camille if he refused her 
request for a pension. Yet this was exactly what 
he did. His conduct, doubtless admits of some pal- 
liation. During his father's lifetime, as M. de S^gur 
tells us, he did not enter into full possession of the 
d'Albon estate, and he had recently married for love, 
a laudable proceeding, but one which does not incline 
a man to generosity towards his own family. Yet, 
making all allowance for these extenuating circum- 



70 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

stances, we cannot feel that his conduct in this matter 
says much for either his sense of justice or the good- 
ness of his heart. The interview between the brother 
and sister was evidently of a most painful nature. 
While finally crushing Julie's hopes of any pecuniary 
resistance, the Count exerted all his supposed authority 
to prevent her from seeking a home with Madame 
du Deffand.^ No doubt, he told her that it was very 
wicked and discontented of her not to be able to g-et 
on with the de Vichys, and that if she would not live 
with them she must make the most of her thirteen 
pounds a year, which was quite a comfortable income 
for a single woman. Endearing speeches of this sort 
have from time immemorial been recognised as the 
peculiar prerogative of relationship, but it is plain that 
Julie did not take them well. Her affectionate con- 
fidence in the playfellow of happier days long gone had 
hitherto maintained itself in the face of every species 
of discouragement, but it gave way now and for ever. 
" I ought by right to receive assistance from the 
d'Albons," she wrote, shortly before her death, in 
her last will and testament, *' not as a benefaction, 
but in restitution for the trust-money of which M. 
d'Albon robbed me on the death of my mother and 
his," and these words accurately indicate the light in 
which this once beloved brother henceforth appeared 
to her. It is infinitely to her credit that she never 
at any time contemplated the form of revenge which 
would have been most felt by Camille — an assertion, 
namely, of her much-dreaded hereditary claim. It is 
true that Madame du Deffand, rather frightened by 

1 We may surmise that he did not counsel her in favour of a husband 
or the veil, since either step would have involved the paying down on his 
part of the 6000 francs left for those purposes. 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 71 

the hysterical protests of her family, had taken the 
precaution of repeatedly requiring her solemnly and 
wholly to abjure any such claim before coming to 
Paris, desiring her on one occasion to formulate this 
renunciation in a letter which could thus be shown 
"in case of need." Yet Madame du Deffand, at the 
very time when she was exacting these pledges, was 
writing to her aunt and adviser, Madame de Luynes : 
" I am not such a fool as to flatter myself that any 
reason of friendship, gratitude, or fear could prevent 
her from asserting her claim, if there was any possi- 
bility of doing so, but as there is none " (owing to the 
surveillance which her patroness was to exercise over 
her), "and as she has plenty of brains, I quite believe 
that she will make no such attempt." So much did 
her ingrained cynicism mislead her as to the true 
character of this girl whom, nevertheless, she regarded 
with a degree of affection unusual with her. During 
the first year of her residence in Paris, Julie may have 
have been as helpless as is here predicted, but when 
she had become one of the social powers of the great 
metropolis, and was surrounded by troops of influential 
friends, we know that she remained equally faithful to 
her plighted word. She herself said, long after, that 
she was far from deserving the praises which had been 
lavished on her for this self-abnegation. The sacrifice 
had been made mainly to her mother's reputation, and 
had not cost her much. We may, indeed, conjecture 
that one cause for her hatred of Lyon was the 
number of gossiping, though doubtless half-sympa- 
thetic, comments on "that dear and honoured 
memory " to which she had been forced to listen, 
coupled, perhaps, with well-meant exhortations to 
stand up for her rights. She may well have rejoiced 



72 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

at the prospect of never hearing the matter men- 
tioned more. 

Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was naturally no 
longer inclined to consider as binding her brother's 
prohibition on the subject of Madame du Deffand,^ 
and she rejoiced the heart of that lady by an 
unqualified assent. There was still need, however, 
of some diplomacy to frustrate the counter-intrigues 
of the de Vichys, and Madame du Deffand, while 
writing to beg that Cardinal de Tencin would ar- 
range for Julie's journey to Paris, judged it prudent 
to advise her not to impart her purpose to anyone 
at Lyon till the very day of setting out. The 
good-natured Archbishop presently discovered a very 
suitable escort, in the Solicitor-General of Lyon, who, 
accompanied by his wife, was going on an expedition 
to the capital immediately after Easter. To their 
charge he confided the young girl, and towards the 
end of April, 1754, she started on her way in a state 
of excitement which is not difficult to imagine, and 
which, we may easily believe, was mainly of a 
pleasurable kind. 

It was her first long journey, and it was made by 
diligence, a circumstance indicating that the worthy 
solicitor had not too much money to throw away. 
Duclos, in his memoirs, laments the degenerate luxury 
into which the age had sunk, as exemplified by the 
sinfully extravagant fashion of travelling by post- 
chaise. In his young days (he was born in 1704) 
everyone travelled by public coaches (such as the 

^ She was then twenty-one years old, having been born in November, 
1732, while the interview with Camille took place in February or March, 
1754 ; except in Normandy, however, twenty-five was the legal age of 
majority, but this had reference rather to property than to liberty of the 
person. 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 73 

Lyon-Paris diligence), now even junior officers, were 
ashamed to be seen in them ! The post-chaise sys- 
tem was certainly not adapted to small incomes if we 
may judge by the experience of Arthur Young, who 
reckoned the cost for a party of two at about one 
shilling per English mile, in which estimate inn-charges 
are, however, included. There were other methods of 
travelling, the most chic of which was of course to take 
your own carriage, generally with post-horses. At the 
opposite end of the scale came what was known as 
the messagerie — i.e. parcels post or carriers' cart — which 
was cheaper even than the diligence, a homely mode of 
conveyance to which King Stanilaus of Poland himself, 
according to Duclos, on one occasion condescended. 
Nor must we forget the litter in which Madame 
de Neuillant was borne from Niort to Paris (a cen- 
tury before Julie's journey thither), while her niece, 
Francoise d'Aubign^, rode, postillion fashion, on one 
of the two mules which supported it behind and 
before, and thus made her first entry into the great 
city, where, as Madame de Maintenon, she was to 
become virtually Queen of France. This primitive 
vehicle had by no means entirely disappeared. We 
find it used about the year 1730, in a country district, 
by Cardinal de Tencin himself, and Marmontel, more 
than ten years later, travelled from Toulouse to Paris 
by a similar method. It was esteemed an easier 
conveyance, especially on bad roads, than the jolting 
wheeled carriage of the day, but Marmontel assures 
us that he would much have preferred travelling by 
messagerie, "on a good horse in the open-air," from 
which we gather that he would have ridden, like 
Mademoiselle d' Aubigne, on one of the horses drawing 
the carrier's cart. The swaying of the litter had, he 



74 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

says, a tendency to produce sickness, especially if 
you sat on the front seat ; for the vehicle in this case 
held two. The journey by messagerie would have 
cost exactly the same — 120 francs; for, though the 
litter was more expensive, his travelling companion, 
a comparatively rich young man, bore the lion's share 
of the charges, indemnifying himself by the process 
which in modern masculine parlance is known as 
"putting on side." The terms included food, which 
the honest muleteer with whom they had contracted 
provided in most generous fashion, feasting them on 
"red partridges, turkeys and truffles." We may 
mention here the case of another celebrated person, 
the Abb^ Morellet, who, in 1741, made his first 
journey to Paris, starting from the same neighbour- 
hood as Julie, mainly by river and canal. He was 
furnished from home with a supply of provisions, of 
which the boatmen, far different from Marmontel's 
muleteer, contrived to defraud him. 

Young, generally so exact in noting what he paid 
for everything en route has unluckily omitted to men- 
tion the cost of travelling by diligence. But concerning 
the attractions offered by that mode of progression he 
expresses himself with no uncertain voice. "This is 
the first French diligence I have been in, and shall be 
the last ; they are detestable."^ His travelling com- 
panions on this occasion, Calais to Paris (1789), seem 
to have been six in number, and of both sexes. He 
complains that they were very noisy, stunned him 
with perpetual singing, played cards and cheated over 
them. They comprised two foreign merchants and a 

^ Note that this was written after the reforms effected by Turgot in the 
construction of public coaches. When JuHe de Lespinasse made her 
journey the diUgences must have been considerably more "detestable." 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 75 

French governess returning from Ireland, persons of 
sufficiently respectable standing, but contemptuously 
classed by him among "the rabble which are some- 
times met in diligences." Sometimes, it seems, they 
travelled on through the night, and sometimes stopped 
to sleep, and his views on the French inns of that 
period are of much interest. "On an average," he 
says, "they are better in two respects and worse in 
all the rest, than those in England." The first point 
of superiority was in the important matter of the com- 
missariat, which was much better than could have 
been got for the same money in England. 

"The common cookery of the French gives great 
advantage. It is true they roast everything to a chip 
if they are not cautioned : but they give such a number 
and variety of dishes, that if you do not like some, 
there are others to please your palate. The dessert 
at a French inn has no rival at an English one ; nor 
are the liqueurs to be despised. We sometimes have 
met with bad wine, but, upon the whole, far better 
than such port as English inns give. Beds are better 
in France ; in England they are good only at good 
inns ; and we have none of that torment, which is so 
perplexing in England, to have the sheets aired ; for 
we never trouble our heads about them, doubtless on 
account of the climate. After these two points all is 
a blank, you have no parlour to eat in ; only a room 
with two, three, or four beds. Apartments badly 
fitted up ; the walls whitewashed ; or paper of 
different sorts in the same room ; or tapestry so old 
as to be a fit nidus for moths and spiders ; and the 
furniture such that an English innkeeper would 
light his fire with it. . . . Bells there are none ; 
the fille must always be bawled for ; and when 



^^ A STAR OF THE SALONS 

she appears, is neither neat, well-dressed, nor hand- 
some." 

Fortified with these picturesque details we have no 
great difficulty in reconstructing that momentous 
journey of our heroine's. Young travelled the dis- 
tance from Lyon to Paris, which he reckons at 300 
English miles, in six days, or about the number 
of hours in which it can now be traversed by rail. 
The excellent Arthur indulged himself on this occa- 
sion in the extra expense of a post-chaise, but as he 
stopped by the way to view all objects of interest 
which presented themselves it is probable that he 
would have got over the ground quicker by coach,^ for 
on the journey from Calais to Paris above alluded to, 
the diligence covered 78 miles the first day, and 102 
in the following day and night. Julie was requested 
by Madame du Deffand to write to her from Chalons 
that she might know what day to expect her arrival. 
At the coach office she would no doubt find her 
employer's carriage awaiting her, and we may suppose 
that either Mademoiselle Devreux, that lady's con- 
fidential maid, or Wiart, her secretary, who seems to 
have been regarded merely in the light of an upper 
servant, was sent to take charge of the bewildered 
country girl, and her (presumably scanty) effects. 
One would gladly know her impressions during her 
first drive through the narrow, crowded, noisy streets 
of Paris. It ended in the Rue St Dominique, on the 
left side of the river, at the spot now occupied by the 
buildings of the Ministry of War, but then by the 
Convent of St Joseph, where Madame du Deffand had 
for some time rented an apartment. That the weary 

* Before Turgot's reforms, above-mentioned, the diligences were said to 
travel nearly as slowly again. 



AN OPENING IN LIFE 77 

traveller had a kind reception there can be no manner 
of doubt. Only a few days before the Marquise had 
written: "Pack up your boxes, my love, and come 
and be the happiness and consolation of my life. It 
shall be not my fault if I do not do the same by you," 
The sympathising spectator may well feel saddened 
by reflecting on the ultimate outcome of this friendship 
begun under auspices apparently the most promising. 



CHAPTER VII 

"the flaunting town" 

IT must not be supposed that Madame du 
Deffand's position in regard to the Convent of 
St Joseph had any analogy with that of the inside 
boarders who have been mentioned in a former 
chapter. It was very usual for religious houses to 
let out a part of their building to tenants of both 
sexes, who were bound by no regulations of any kind, 
had no dealings with the sisters in the interior, kept 
their own servants, entertained their friends, and went 
in and out as they pleased all through the day and 
night. The Convent had a large amount of accom- 
modation available for inmates of this sort, and among 
their number we find, at one time or another, the names 
of several fairly distinguished persons, not all of them 
remarkable for saintliness of demeanour, nor even 
all belonging to one sex ; for example, Mademoiselle 
Clairon, the celebrated actress, Charles Edward the 
Pretender, and, in the previous century, Madame 
de Montespan, who was, in truth, the pious foundress 
of the community. The apartment which this last- 
named lady had in her lifetime reserved for herself 
was the one now occupied by Madame du Deflfand, 
and was situated in a wing apart from the convent 
proper surrounding a separate courtyard provided 
with an entrance of its own, so that the sacred cloture 
of the sisters might be in no way interfered with. 
In this pleasant and far from austere retreat, the 

78 



THE FLAUNTING TOWN 79 

Marquise had established herself, as it proved, for the 
rest of her life. Since her husband's death, her 
revenue from various sources amounted to about 
37,000 francs, or over ;^i6oo, an income which 
to most of us does not, I suspect, even in these 
days, appear wholly contemptible, and which was 
then equivalent to a much larger sum. She could 
afford, as the cant phrase goes, "to live her own 
life," and this life, though in essentials perfectly 
irreproachable (for even Renault had now ceased to 
be more than a friend), was of as unconventional a 
description as we can well imagine. For a girl of 
Julie's upbringing it must have been indeed a strange 
existence which she was called upon to share, an 
existence bewildering, dazzling, in some respects irk- 
some, in others wholly delightful. We can imagine 
nothing quite like it in our own day, and even then it 
was considered in some respects unique. Madame 
du Deffand had always regarded solitude and the 
company of her own thoughts as among the greatest 
of earthly ills, and in this mental attitude she was still 
further confirmed by her increasing blindness. To 
this last-named cause, and to her habit of insomnia 
(then as now very frequent in fashionable circles), may 
doubtless be traced the extraordinary mania which led 
her literally to turn night into day. For her the day 
commenced regularly at six o'clock in the evening, the 
hour at which she first quitted her bedroom. Then 
began the stream of visitors, including all the most 
brilliant and interesting persons in Paris, some of 
whom will frequently appear in these pages. If the 
mistress of the house had no engagement out of doors, 
this reception went on till long after midnight, but 
often she went out to supper at the houses of friends 



8o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in Paris or in the suburbs, or earlier in the evening 
to the theatre. Play and opera then began at six p.m., 
or before, and were over at eight or soon after, well 
before the time of the evening meal, which was often 
later than nine. It was the favourite repast of 
Madame du Deffand, who, as a natural result of her 
noctivagant habits, eschewed the midday dinners 
which were a fashionable form of entertainment in 
some circles. When she was not invited out to 
supper, or more properly, perhaps, when she did not 
care to accept an invitation, she always entertained a 
few friends round her own hospitable board, and once 
a week, on a stated day, gave a banquet on a larger 
scale, which held a respectable place among the social 
fixtures of the period. When, on evenings at home, 
the last guest had departed, or when she had returned 
from her gaieties abroad, the hour being in both cases 
about two or three a.m., it was still too early to think of 
bed, and through the rest of the night she had to find 
amusement as she could, by her own solitary fireside. 
This curious life was shared in all its fullness by 
Julie de Lespinasse, for Madame du Deffand abode 
most honourably by her undertaking that the girl 
should rank as a real companion, and not as an 
upper-grade menial. She was not primarily engaged 
even as a secretary.^ That office belonged of right 
to Wiart, the majordomo already mentioned, an 
honest and devoted retainer, who never dreamt of 
considering himself a gentleman. It is certain that 
Julie did frequently write and read Madame du 
Deffand's letters to and from intimate friends, but 

^ Madame du Deffand sometimes wrote her own letters with the help 
of an apparatus contrived for keeping the lines straight. The writing 
was large, but quite legible. 




a -^ K 



( 



THE FLAUNTING TOWN 8i 

this seems to have arisen naturally from the circum- 
stance that they were friends to her as well as to her 
patroness, and that communication could thus on both 
sides be carried on with greater ease and freedom 
than through the medium of a social inferior. Read- 
ing aloud may have been to some extent part of the 
agreement, since after Julie had quitted St Joseph 
we find her place supplied by a lectrice en litre. It 
was resorted to mainly as a means of passing the 
hours between the return home of Madame du 
Deffand, or the departure of her guests, and the 
time when she thought herself likely to sleep. There 
is no doubt that this service was felt by the girl as 
a heavy burden, though we may hope that she was 
sometimes allowed to go to bed before her patroness, 
especially when some heroic exertion in the matter 
of early rising was required of her that same morn- 
ing. For example, in a letter written to Madame 
du Deffand, then away in the country, she observes 
that as it is now after i a.m. she had better not sit 
up any longer, since she must go to church the 
following day (Sunday), and also intends to take a 
bath. A Saturday half holiday of this kind may 
perhaps have been a fairly usual institution, for the 
Marquise herself had now begun to attend Mass 
regularly as an essential factor in the respectable 
life. 

On ordinary occasions the working day did not be- 
gin before six p.m., the hour of Madame du Deffand s 
first appearance. The initial difficulty of sleeping in 
the daytime being once overcome, Julie would thus 
have sufficient leisure for repose, and, under the 
guardianship of some trusted friends of the house, 
might even take exercise, as exercise was then 



82 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

understood by Parisian ladies, in one or other of 
the pubHc gardens. Of these the Tuileries and 
the Palais Royal were the most fashionable, the 
Luxembourg being favoured rather by the bour- 
geoisie, and the Jardin du Roi, now the Botanical 
Garden, by such eccentric persons as preferred fresh 
air and quiet to the joys of seeing and being seen. 
Sunset was the correct hour for the promenade, and 
the programme was to drive as far as the gates 
(walking in the streets being indeed well-nigh an 
impossibility), and then to alight from your carriage 
and walk with your party up and down under the 
trees, sometimes completely blocking up the pathway, 
which was only guaranteed to hold four crinolines 
abreast. It was a recognised opportunity for meeting 
one's friends, male as well as female, and there was 
much exchanging of greetings, and stopping for a 
minute to talk, or joining other parties, and when 
the weather was warm enough the benches^ were 
filled with rows of well-dressed people, chatting at 
their ease, and criticising the costumes of those who 
continued walking. Two or three times we find 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse enjoying this exhilarat- 
ing recreation, and as she was in some respects very 
much of her century it was probably sufficient to 
satisfy her demands in the matter of air and exercise. 
The real work of the day began, as we have seen, at 
six P.M. and continued all night and every night, for 
Julie almost from the first seems to have been in- 
cluded in invitations to Madame du Deffand. That 
lady's prediction that people would soon be glad to 

^ Up to 1760 wooden benches were the only seat§, but in that year 
some thousands of chairs, to be hired, were introduced, and the benches 
came to be considered low. 



THE flau:nting town 83 

have her for her own sake was abundantly verified, 
and it is but just to the older woman to say that she 
did all in her power to promote this state of things. 
We are thus brought face to face with the common- 
place consideration that the thirteen pounds a year, 
which probably sufficed to cover her personal expenses 
at the chateau of Champrond, would be quite inade- 
quate for that purpose when she was mixing daily in 
society, often of a very distinguished kind. Susanne 
Curchod, at the very outset of that visit to the French 
capital which was to result happily in her marriage 
with Necker, had to expend more than that sum 
before she could pass muster in a Parisian drawing- 
room, and even Rousseau's Th^rese, the ex-kitchen- 
maid, who was certainly not overwhelmed with social 
obligations, found it impossible to keep her dress 
allowance for the year within a similar figure. We 
do not know for certain whether Julie received a 
salary for her services at St Joseph. In her abortive 
attempt at negotiation with Camille d'Albon, Madame 
du Deffand had spoken vaguely of settling a life 
annuity of 400 francs yearly upon his sister. This 
offer is not again, in so many words, referred to, 
but in July, 1754, or less than three months after the 
arrival of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse in Paris, we 
find a contract drawn up by which the Duke of 
Orleans undertakes to pay her 692 francs an- 
nually for the rest of her life. It does not by 
any means necessarily follow that this was a gift 
from the Duke's private purse. It was quite usual 
for men in his position to undertake the payment 
of life-annuities as a matter of speculation, and the 
capital may have been supplied by Madame du DefTand, 
who in that case was generous beyond her first inten- 



84 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

tions. The bestowal of such annuities was a very 
common factor in the relations between employers 
and employed. They were frequently conferred upon 
servants of long standing, and the ex-tutor or governess 
in a wealthy house had almost a prescriptive right to 
receive one when his or her pupils were grown up. 
And it must certainly be admitted that this last-named 
custom compares not unfavourably with those current 
amongst our own present-day aristocracy who, in such 
cases, are wont to be rather ^ excessively liberal of their 
recommendations but not generally of recognition in 
any more substantial form. 

Julie's yearly spending money would thus amount 
to about forty-three pounds, and as a circumstance in 
her favour we must not omit to notice that she had 
already won the affection of that important personage 
Mademoiselle Devreux, who had accompanied her mis- 
tress on the visit to Champrond. The friendship of an 
experienced lady's maid is no despicable advantage 
where new dresses are to be bought or old ones to 
be arranged with a view to combining elegance and 
economy, and we can easily believe that the young 
girl thus supported deserved even then the reputation 
attaching to her in her later years of being ever 
dressed gracefully and becomingly though with 
simplicity. She was one of those persons who repay 
careful dressing, for her figure was singularly graceful, 
and her face, though by her own admission never 
regularly pretty, might at this early period of her life 
fairly be called charming. The portrait by Carmon- 

^ The writer knows a case in which a girls' school was started with a 
list of flourishing references to the aristocratic parents of former pupils. 
In a few years the school changed hands, but the list of references still 
continued to be advertised. 



THE FLAUNTING TOWN 85 

telle shows her as she was while still in the bloom 
of youth and before that dire disease by which one 
woman in every four was then permanently disfigured 
had set its mark upon her. We notice that her cheeks 
are but slightly touched with rouge, and that her black 
taffetas gown, though it would scarcely satisfy a dress 
reformer, by no means reduces her figure to the sylph- 
like proportions which we admire in many ladies of 
that period, notably in Madame de Genlis, who, how- 
ever, must be allowed the credit of preaching, if she 
did not practise, the principles of hygiene. Her dark 
brown hair, concealed, according to the universal cus- 
tom, beneath a layer of powder, is arranged in one of 
those pleasing and unexaggerated coiffures obtaining 
at this time and succeeded about 1770 by the towering 
erections which made kneeling on the carriage floor 
compulsory for ladies in full dress. Her eyes are large 
and dark, and the " tip-tilted " nose imparts a certain 
shade of piquancy to her thoughtful and intelligent 
face. 

The special charm of her appearance lay, however, 
as all eye-witnesses agree, in expression — a kind of 
charm which no picture can at all adequately convey. 

"Though not actually beautiful, you are distin- 
guished-looking, and attract attention," wrote the 
gallant old President Henault. 

"What I shall say of your appearance is only what 
seems to strike everybody," wrote the cold and reserved 
d'Alembert, "that your whole bearing is most graceful 
and distinguished and that you have much mind and 
expression in all your features, things far preferable 
to mere soulless beauty." 

" That which pre-eminently distinguished her," wrote 
her faithless lover, Guibert, ' * was that supreme charm 



86 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

without which beauty can only attain to mere lifeless 
perfection, namely expression. Hers had no particular 
characteristic, it combined them all, so that you could 
not precisely say that it was either witty, or lively, or 
sweet, or dignified, or humorous or gracious." 

But the admiration attracted by Julie's appearance 
was slight compared with that bestowed on her 
manners and conversation. This exquisite circle, in 
which was comprised the fine flower of Parisian 
intellect and breeding, could not sufficiently express 
their astonishment at the ease with which the young 
rustic, as though to the manner born, at once became 
one of themselves. 

" You have discovered the world's ways by intuition," 
says Renault; "it would make no difference if you 
were transplanted, you would take root anywhere, you 
would peep through a grating at Madrid, wear your 
scarf awry in London" (this is rather cruel!) "and 
tell the grand Turk at Constantinople that your feet 
were free from dust " (supposed to be an Oriental 
form of greeting). 

D'Alembert, whose early education enabled him 
better than the President to understand the difficulties 
surmounted by Julie, is even more emphatic in his 
testimony on this point. 

" The perfection of your manners might not be 
remarkable in a woman born in Court circles, but in 
your case it deserves the utmost admiration. You 
brought it with you from the depths of the provinces, 
where you had never met anyone who could have 
imparted it to you. You were as perfect on this 
point the day after your arrival in Paris as you are 
to-day [1771]. From the first day you were as 
natural and as much at ease in the most brilliant and 



THE FLAUNTING. TOWN 87 

most exclusive circles, as if you had passed your life 
amongst them. ... In short, you intuitively divined 
the language of what is called £'ood society." 

The intellectual powers which lay behind this 
marvellous social charm we shall have abundant 
opportunities of estimating in the course of this record. 
Meanwhile we may linger for a moment to glance at 
the brilliant company who thronged the sa/on at St 
Joseph, that charming room with the silken hangings 
of light gold blended with flame colour. Dainty minia- 
ture sofas and luxurious easy-chairs were lavishly 
provided, and all about were scattered tiny tables 
littered with the latest publications, including even 
the prohibited pamphlets of Voltaire. The stream 
of easy and polished talk flowed continuously, now 
upon art and literature, and now upon the most recent 
spicy anecdote from Versailles, now upon the canons 
of Biblical criticism, and now upon the voice and 
character of a debutante at the opera. The un- 
questioned queen of the assembly and conversation, 
to whom all bowed in deference, was the little pale, 
fragile woman, with the biting wit and the ready 
imperious tongue and the sightless eyes which, such 
was the acuteness of her other senses, seemed almost 
to see as in time past. Yet nearly an equal measure 
of attention, though after a less submissive sort, was 
bestowed on the graceful, self-possessed girl who 
moved and spoke as if born to supply what was want- 
ing in the mistress of the house, and to perform all 
the duties rendered impossible to her by her infirmity. 
And Madame du Deffand was well pleased that it 
should be so, for the evil days of jealous tyranny on 
one side, and smouldering resentment on the other, 
lay as yet in the far distance, and her attitude towards 



88 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

this marvellous ugly duckling was marked by all the 
triumph of a successful discoverer, mingled with a 
touch of feeling more nearly approaching to the 
maternal instinct than she ever showed at any other 
period of her existence ; while Julie on her part Celt 
something of that ecstasy of joyful gratitude experi- 
enced by her prototype when his bitter pilgrimage 
had ended in a fair haven, and the swans hailed him 
as one of their number. 



CHAPTER VIII 

NEW FRIENDS 

AMONG those frequenters of Madame du Deffand's 
salon who were especially distinguished by their 
admiration for Mademoiselle de Lespinasse the first 
place, in right alike of age and position, is due to 
President H^nault. The connection of earlier days 
entitled him to a kind of brevet rank as master of 
the house, and he seems to have fulfilled the duties 
of that station with much ability and helpfulness. It 
was mainly through his introductions that Madame 
du Deffand had made good her social footing, and 
gathered around her her present circle of distinguished 
friends. In domestic matters he was equally her 
stand-by. It was to him that she entrusted the 
important charge of selecting a cook for her establish- 
ment at St Joseph, and in this confidence she was 
well justified, for Renault was universally admitted 
to be a past master in the art of supper-giving, and 
prided himself highly on his skill therein. " How I 
should like to order you a supper in my very best 
style, and to think that you would enjoy it," is his 
effusion of sentiment on hearing that his lady, then 
absent at Forges, found her appetite improved by 
taking the waters. But it would appear that after- 
wards, on one occasion at least, Madame du Deffand, 
possibly from motives of economy, rashly attempted 
to engage a cook for herself, and that the result was 
a lamentable demonstration of the superiority of 
89 



90 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

masculine rule. "He has better intentions than^ 
Madame de Brinvilliers," groaned H^nault, on whose 
digestion the creations of this inferior artist had an 
unfavourable effect, "but that's all the difference 
there is between the two ! " 

The president's affection was shewn in a yet 
more effectual fashion by an annuity of 6000 francs, 
which during many years he secretly paid to Madame 
du Deffand. Through his influence at Court another 
6000 francs yearly was procured for her from the 
royal treasury. It is certainly not surprising that 
H^nault should have been the fetich, or, as Horace 
Walpole puts it, " the pagod," of the salo7i at St Joseph. 

"The president is very near deaf," writes Walpole 
spitefully, "and much nearer superannuated. He 
sits by the table : the mistress of the house, who 
formerly was his, inquires after every dish on the 
table, is told who has eaten of which, and then bawls 
the bill of fare of every individual into the president's 
ears. In short, every mouthful is proclaimed, and so 
is every blunder I make against grammar. Some that 
I make on purpose, succeed ; and one of them is to 
be reported to the queen to-day by H^nault, who 
is her great favourite." 

This appalling description, calculated to awaken a 
sympathetic thrill in all who have had experience of 
the inexhaustible curiosity proper to the aged deaf, 
and the painful results which attend it, dates, be it 
observed, from 1765, eleven years later than Julie's 
arrival in Paris. At that comparatively early epoch 
the president was only sixty-nine,^ and his deafness 
had not yet assumed the colossal proportions indicated 

1 Th6 notorious poisoner in the reign of Louis XIV. 

2 He was born in 1685. 




LE PRESIDENT RENAULT 

FROM A DRAWING IN THE BIBLIOTHfeoUE NATIONALE 



NEW FRIENDS 91 

by "^alpole. He was still an exceedingly charming 
old man, sustaining with all grace and decorum the 
tradition of a youth famed for its gallantries. His 
American-sounding title, conferred on him at the age 
of twenty-five, has in its actual signification (President 
of the First Court of Appeal ^) something which we find 
difficulty in harmonising with the life and character 
of its possessor. His gay and brilliant personality 
has more affinity with that of the " Judge " who 
courted Maud Miiller in the sunny hayfield, and drew 
smiles from the lawyers by humming an old love-tune 
in court, than with our insular conception of the 
judicial office and its bearers. Like other legal 
luminaries of his day, H^nault contrived to devote 
an enormous proportion of his time to society, an 
achievement due, we may assume, not so much to the 
greater versatility of that generation as to their 
comparative disregard for professional claims. He 
was not of noble birth, but his charming manners, 
combined with certain minute literary pretensions, 
soon procured him the entree into the most exclusive 
circles, and won him favour alike at the profligate 
Court of the Regent and in the sober household of 
Queen Marie Leczinska. 

To do him justice, he made himself not less agree- 
able in his domestic than in his social relations. An 
aff^ectionate and attentive, though far from faithful, 
husband he was blindly adored by a submissive wife 
— their married life, in fact, going near to realise that 
masculine ideal of a perfect union which has been so 
much admired in Fielding's "Amelia" — with this 
acceptable distinction, that they had plenty of money, 
and Madame Henault was not obliged to save six- 
1 " Pr&ident de la Premiere Chambre des Enqu^tes." 



92 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

pences from her own supper while the president was 
expending guineas in card-playing and other less 
mentionable pursuits. In the quasi - matrimonial 
alliance which followed his wife's death Renault 
was unfailing in kindness and loyalty to a singularly 
unloving and unsympathetic woman. Their curious 
correspondence of 1742, occasioned by the above- 
mentioned visit to Forges, shows how often she 
must have irritated even his easy temper, and disap- 
pointed his very moderate expectations in the matter 
of sentiment. Her letters show that preoccupation 
with her own feelings and that indifference to the 
feelings of everybody else which were habitual with 
her, while H^nault, on his part, is full of solicitude for 
her health and well-being, and takes an amount of 
trouble most commendable in a busy man to keep 
her acquainted with every scrap of news by which 
she might be amused or interested. Something like 
a quarrel seems at one time imminent. 

"Your letters are charming; in fact, you are a 
most delightful person to live away from," she 
writes, to which ambiguous compliment he replies 
with a flash of unmistakable anger. "You never said 
a truer word, but it is not always wise to tell the 
whole truth. I believe in my heart that if you could 
arrange your life as you pleased, the part of absent 
friend would be the one always allotted to me. . . . 
Why can't you say at once, ' I feel or rather I see that 
you have been doing your best for ten years to win 
my affection, but I promise you, you never will ' ? . . . 
As for what you say about the falling-off in your 
looks, I could reply that that would never make 
any difference in my feelings. Much you would care 
whether it did ! I laugh at my own presumption in 



NEW FRIENDS 93 

thinking such a thing. But the real fact is, I am 
quite certain that the waters will on the contrary, in 
the long run, much improve your appearance. Other- 
wise I should not mention the subject, feeling that it 
would be a liberty in me to do so." 

But the president was far too useful a friend to be 
lightly parted with, and the astute Marquise soon 
managed to bring him back to his normal attitude 
of amused and serviceable toleration. His brilliant 
companion had become to him, in his own words, 
"a necessary evil," and the bond between them was 
only severed by death, but he was perfectly conscious 
that she made no appeal to the deeper feelings of his 
nature. These were reserved for Madame de Castel- 
moron, a lady who has no part in this story, and 
for his own family (he had no children, but was an 
excellent uncle). Some measure of them, too, he 
bestowed on the young girl who, for all her tact and 
self-possession, brought into the salon of Madame du 
Deffand a capacity for enthusiasm, nay, for passion, 
widely at variance with the character of its mistress. 
He was exceedingly struck by Julie de Lespinasse, 
and we may be sure that she always accompanied her 
patroness to those admirable suppers at his artistically 
furnished house in the Rue St Honore. We may be 
equally sure that in her appreciation of his hospitality 
she did not fall into the mistake committed by 
Voltaire,^ whose complimentary couplet was never 
forgiven by the president, of undervaluing his magnum 
opus, the famous, "Abreg^ Chronologique." If we 
are to believe contemporary gossip, H^nault's affection 

^ " Renault, famous for your suppers, 
And for your Chronology." 

Renault considered the juxtaposition a slight on his "Chronology." 



94 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

for Julie went the length of an offer of marriage, but 
it is more probable that if he ever entertained such 
a project he had the good sense to relinquish it 
without a formal declaration. Some passages in his 
"Portrait" of her — already alluded to — seem, as 
M. de Segur acutely observes, to bear out this conjec- 
ture. "Your heart is not easily won," he writes. . . . 
There is something of a challenge about you. A 
man might well be proud of turning your head, but in 
most cases he would have his trouble for nothing." 

No one certainly was less likely than Julie de 
Lespinasse to entertain the idea of a mercenary 
marriage with a. man thirty-seven years her senior, 
and the president's perception of this fact increased 
his respect for her and did not diminish the half- 
paternal affection which survived even her rupture 
with Madame du Deffand. 

A less frequent but highly esteemed guest at St 
Joseph was the Chevalier d'Aydie, whose manners 
were held by his contemporaries to represent the last 
word of perfection, and whose letters in effect leave 
upon the mind an impression of finished and rather 
melancholy grace. Like H^nault, he had figured at 
the Court of the Regent and had behind him the 
memory of a stormy youth, but there the resemblance 
between the two men ceases. Passion, sin, repent- 
ance, expiation, sacrifice, words which, when applied 
to the genial president, seem absolutely without mean- 
ing, are fundamentally implicated in any conception 
of the Chevalier's character, and this superior capacity 
for both right and wrong doing lifts him at once to 
a different moral level. To the modern world he is 
best known as the lover of Mademoiselle Aisse, the most 
pathetic and appealing figure in the long procession 



NEW FRIENDS 95 

of eighteenth-century women. Born of Circassian 
parents, she was purchased in the slave-market at 
Constantinople by M. de Ferriol, then French 
Ambassador to Turkey, who sent her over to Paris 
and placed her in charge of his brother's wife, a 
worthy sister of the notorious Madame de Tencin. 
Whether his ultimate intentions with regard to the 
fair child, then three or four years old, were of an 
entirely blameless nature may well be matter for 
doubt, but in the end he chose the better part by re- 
solving to consider her only as his adopted daughter. 
Aisse (Haidee) received what was then considered a 
most superior education, and in due time was intro- 
duced into society of a distinguished but not over- 
reputable description. She had grown up beautiful, 
intelligent, and winning, with a certain lilylike charm 
which contrasted piquantly with her environment. 
Like her friend, Madame du Deffand, she had the 
honour of attracting the Duke of Orleans himself, 
but with a different result — for, whether from her 
convent training or from innate rectitude, the girl was 
virtuously minded, and for once the Regent sighed in 
vain. 

In those social circles in which Aisse moved the 
Chevalier d'Aydie was a prominent and popular 
figure. They fell in love, the love of a lifetime, but 
the Chevalier was a Knight of Malta, and as such 
vowed to celibacy. It is true that from vows of 
this kind there was no great difficulty in obtaining 
a dispensation, but to procure this he must have 
resigned the prebends from which, as an almost por- 
tionless younger son, he derived the principal part 
of his income. He had accustomed himself to look 
upon marriage, except with an heiress, as impossible, 



96 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

and Aiss6 had only an annuity of 4000 francs, 
bequeathed her by her guardian, M. de Ferriol, who 
had now passed away. That such a love-story, 
at such an epoch and in such surroundings, should 
end in disaster was a foregone conclusion. The 
points which differentiate this story from a thousand 
others are these two : that the bitterness of her shame, 
though hidden from the world, was sufficient to kill 
the woman, and that the man devoted the rest of his 
life to making such reparation as was still possible. 

In her hour of need Aiss6 was loyally and effectually 
befriended by Bolingbroke's second wife, formerly 
Marquise de Villette, the cousin of Madame de Main- 
tenon. Under pretence of taking the girl with her 
on a visit to England, she concealed her in a remote 
quarter of Paris, and when her child was born found 
a safe asylum for it in the convent presided over by 
Madame de Villette, the daughter of Lady Boling- 
broke's first marriage. In view of the character borne 
by Madame de Ferriol herself, and by most of the 
ladies of her entourage, we are half inclined to wonder 
that such secrecy should have been considered neces- 
sary, but the moral code of the day was less lenient in 
regard to single than to married women, as is demon- 
strated by that curious rule of Court etiquette which, 
in the interests of decorum, required that a king's 
mistress should be doubly, instead of singly, an adul- 
teress. But though thus shielded from the world's 
censures Aisse could not recover from the shame of 
having lived for a time a double life and the anguish 
of separation from her child whom she could only visit 
by stealth. Her health gave way, and she faded 
slowly to the grave. In vain the Chevalier, his better 
nature aroused by the sight of her suffering, determined 



NEW FRIENDS 97 

manfully to brave the risks of poverty, and implored 
her with importunity to become his wife. With a 
humility aknost shocking to our modern feeling, she 
declared that she was unworthy of such an alliance, 
and that nothing would induce her so to injure his 
career. Besides, the renunciation of his benefices 
would mean that there would be less possibility of 
saving money for the child, who, though knowing her 
father not at all, and her mother only as a kind lady 
who came sometimes to see her, was now the principal 
object in life to both. 

When Aisse, soothed by the consolations of religion 
and the remorseful tenderness of her lover, had passed 
tranquilly away from the world which had never, she 
said, afforded her a single moment's happiness, the 
Chevalier d'Aydie seemed to grow into another fashion 
of man. His youthful follies fell from him, and the 
remainder of his life appears to have justly merited 
the character, attributed to him by Voltaire, of a 
Bayard sans peiir et sans reproche. He turned his 
back decisively on the gay metropolis, the scene of 
his frivolities and dissipations, and went to live in the 
country, taking with him openly the little girl, who had 
hitherto lived happily enough under the care of the 
good-natured nuns. He presented her as his daughter 
to his family and friends, who, from respect to him, 
received her on the footing of legitimacy, and devoted 
himself henceforth to her happiness. By exercising 
strict self-denial, he was able to marry her, with a re- 
spectable dowry, to a neighbour in every way eligible, 
and she lived a prosperous and honoured life, and 
has left descendants who still boast of their beautiful 
ancestress Aisse. 

From motives, doubtless, of economy, the Chevalier, 

G 



98 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

with the exception of an occasional visit to Paris, 
spent the rest of his days at the old family chateau in 
Perigord. This patriarchal existence, representing the 
best side of French country life, is thus gaily described 
by him in a letter to Madame du Deffand : 

" I have better employment than reading, madame. 
I hunt and play games and amuse myself from morning 
to night with my brothers and our children, and I 
must frankly say that I have never been more happy 
nor better pleased with my company." 

Yet it is plain that he often regretted the stimulating 
intellectual atmosphere of the capital. 

"When I think of you, madame," he writes, "and 
of the circle which you have gathered round you, I 
resent being a hundred leagues from you. For I 
have neither Caesar's vanity nor his ambition. I had 
rather be admitted on suffrance into good company 
than be the most important person in indifferent. 
Still, if I cannot say that I am in the first-mentioned 
position here, I can at least assure you that I am not 
in the second." 

Shortly after the arrival of Julie de Lespinasse at 
St Joseph, the Chevalier, then more than sixty years 
old, made her acquaintance, during one of his periodical 
sojourns in Paris, and was from the first strongly 
attracted by her. In the respectful tenderness with 
which he regarded her there mingled perhaps some 
thought of his own daughter and of the far different 
lot which had fallen to this much-wronged girl born 
under conditions very similar. 

" Heaven owed you the consolation which you 
receive from the attentions of Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse," he writes to Madame du Deffand after 
his return into Pdrigord. "... She supplies the 



NEW FRIENDS 99 

place of your lost sight, and what you value still more 
madame, she affords you an object for your affections. 
I am proud of having from the first appreciated her as 
she deserves, and I beg you not to let her altogether 
forofet me." 

Madame du Deffand replies : 

*' Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is deeply gratified by 
the charming things you say of her. When you know 
more of her, you will see how well she deserves them. 
Every day I am more pleased with her." 

Equally generous is her attitude with regard to 
another old friend, of her own sex this time, who fell 
with the same rapidity under the charm of her pro- 
tegee. This was the Marechale de Luxembourg, best 
known perhaps for her protection of Jean- Jacques 
Rousseau. She too, as Duchesse de Boufflers, had 
had a place in the Chronique Scandaleuse of the 
Regency, and had chosen the same method of reform 
as Madame du Deffand, by entering into a semi- 
matrimonial connection with a person of distinction 
and repute. In her case, however, this curious kind 
of alliance was legitimatised, on the death of her first 
husband, by a real marriage, and as Duchesse de 
Luxembourg she held a position in society due even 
more to her talents than to her rank. Her beauty, 
once remarkable, is said by some of her contempor- 
aries to have declined prematurely ; according to 
others she retained a large share of it till late in life, 
but all are agreed concerning the singular charm of 
her manner — so perfect as always to appear unstudied 
— and the remarkable acuteness of her judgment. On 
all those questions of good taste and good form which 
to that generation ranked among the most important 
matters in life she was gifted with an intuition almost 



loo A STAR OF THE SALONS 

resembling inspiration, and from her opinion on such 
points there was no appeal. She was the unques- 
tioned arbiter, not only of elegances, but, what is 
rather more surprising, of decorums, the unrivalled 
exponent and upholder of that marvellous code of 
breeding concerning which Madame de Genlis said 
that, if it had only rested upon realities, the Age of 
Gold must have flourished in Paris. The slightest 
taint of vulgarity was anathema to her, and the offen- 
ders, whatever their rank or importance, trembled like 
schoolchildren in disgrace before the scathing power of 
her sarcasm. One Sunday, when she and a number 
of other great ladies assembled at the Prince de 
Conti's country house were awaiting the arrival of 
their host before adjourning to the chapel to hear 
Mass, she whiled away the time by looking over the 
various books of devotion with which her companions 
had armed themselves, and gave utterance to some 
severe criticisms upon the flagrant errors of taste 
abounding in these pious volumes. One lady timidly 
ventured upon the stock defence that the Almighty 
looks not to the language, but to the intention of a 
prayer. " Don't you ever believe that, madame," 
answered the Marechale very seriously. There is 
something fine about this aesthetic intolerance which 
reminds us of Matthew Arnold and his contention that 
the Deity is "disserved and displeased" by such a 
hymn as the once popular : 

" My Jesus to know, and to feel His blood flow." 

It was probably the perception of a somewhat 
similar quality of refined fastidiousness in Julie de 
Lespinasse which first attracted her to the young girl, 
and the chivalrous instinct, never wanting in genuinely 



NEW FRIENDS loi 

well-bred persons, led her to show it even greater 
honour than she would have done in the case of some- 
one more richly endowed with the gifts of fortune. 
The Luxembourg family had a charming country villa 
near the little town of Montmorenci, three leagues 
from Paris. The whole neighbourhood, says Grimm, 
was a kind of garden famous for its fruits, especially 
its cherries ; the chateau and its surrounding park are 
described in glowing terms by Rousseau, to whom the 
Duke had assigned a small pavilion in the grounds, 
to occupy when the fancy took him. An invitation to 
Montmorenci was esteemed a high honour, much sought 
after in the fashionable world and conceded to few, 
but Julie was from the first asked to accompany 
Madame du Deffand in her visits to the chateau, and 
treated as a guest whom the heads of the house de- 
lighted to honour. It was here that, at a somewhat 
later date, she made the acquaintance of Jean-Jacques, 
whose democratic misanthropy was not proof against 
the perfect breeding and the genuine kindness of the 
Marechale and her husband. Like Carlyle, he much 
preferred the " effete " aristocracy to the middle classes, 
and perhaps, if the truth were told, even to the virtuous 
peasants who loom so large in his writings. 

No sketch of Madame du Deffand's circle can be 
esteemed complete without some mention of Pont de 
Veyle, one of her oldest and most constant friends. 
He was the son of that Madame de Ferriol to whose 
charge Aiss^ had been confided by her brother-in-law, 
and seems to have always entertained a brotherly 
feeling for the fair and ill-fated Circassian. That his 
lifelong intimacy with Madame du Deffand, which to- 
wards the end was slightly endangered by his devel- 
oping an irritating habit of coughing, had nothing of 



I02 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

a romantic nature about it may be gathered from 
the fireside scene dramatically described by Grimm. 
' ' Pont de Veyle ? " * * Madame ? " " Where are you ? " 
"At the corner of the fire." "Are you lounging 
comfortably with your feet on the fender, as one 
should do in a friend's house.'*" "Yes, madame." 
" There's no doubt that there are few friendships of 
as long standing as ours." " That's quite true." 
" Fifty years, isn't it ? " " Yes, more than fifty years." 
"And not the slightest misunderstanding in all that 
time?" "No, I have always been surprised at that 
myself." " But, Pont de Veyle, isn't that just because, 
in our hearts, we have never cared a straw for each 
other?" " That's quite possible, madame." 

But if not remarkable for warmth of feeling, Pont 
de Veyle had a liberal share of the social talents which 
almost above everything else contributed to make a 
man's reputation. Walpole, indeed, who seldom says 
a good word for any member of his own sex, states 
that Pondevelle (so he elects to spell the name) "can 
be very agreeable but seldom is. ... He has not the 
least idea of cheerfulness in conversation, seldom 
speaks but on grave subjects, and not often on them. 
. . . . His air and look are cold and forbidding." 
But even Walpole grudgingly admits his " very amus- 
ing talent " for writing and singing comic verses. 
They were sometimes extremely indecent, but he 
" is so old and sings so well that it is permitted in 
all companies." The severe Madame de Genlis also 
notices his ready gift of improvisation, which reminds 
us of Theodore Hook. When he was staying at the 
Prince de Conti's house, where she was also a guest, 
a regular part of every evening's entertainment was a 
set of impromptu verses from him describing all the 



NEW FRIENDS 103 

ladies of the company, very cleverly done, and sung 
with great spirit. It is to be observed that she by no 
means confirms the strictures of Walpole upon Pont 
de Veyle's "forbidding" manners, but on the contrary 
considers him a charming old man. 

In our enumeration of the personal friends of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, amongst whom Pont 
de Veyle, though mentioned in her letters, does not 
appear to have been reckoned, we must not forget 
the Marquis d'Uss^. Her acquaintance with him 
dates indeed from an earlier period of her existence, 
for being a relation of the de Vichys he had met her 
at the chdteau of Champrond, and we learn from a 
letter of Madame du Deffand that he and his family 
were strongly interested on hearing of Julie's pro- 
spective arrival in Paris. He was an eccentric old 
man, much given to absence of mind, but universally 
esteemed for his sterling qualities. " Everybody 
loves him," wrote H^nault, "if only because it is the 
fashion to do so. But only those who are good them- 
selves can appreciate him as he really deserves." His 
affection for Julie de Lespinasse was strong and con- 
stant, and found a final quaint expression in his 
legacy to her of his " Mor^ri's Historical Dictionary." 

Another faithful friend, who was nearer her own 
age and survived her by many years, was the Comte 
d'Anl^zy, a relation of the d'Albon family. He is 
known chiefly for the courage which enabled him to 
make his life a success despite the terrible handicap 
of personal deformity. The kind and feeling terms 
in which Madame du Deffand alludes to this affliction 
are well known, and throw a world of light upon her 
character. "That nasty humpback is in the greatest 
grief," she writes to Walpole two days after the death 



I04 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of Julie de Lespinasse. The woman whom she had 
once hailed as the " happiness and consolation " of her 
life had long since incurred her hatred, and no terms 
of abuse were now too coarse or too cruel for this 
dead enemy and for those who had continued to love 
her. 

But the one member of Madame du Deffand's circle 
who was destined to exercise most influence upon the 
fortunes of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse has as yet been 
mentioned only in passing allusion. D'Alembert, for 
the reader will have conjectured that it is he who is 
meant, deserves to have a larger space allotted to him 
than any of the foregoing, and will be fully dealt with 
in the chapter immediately ensuing. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FOUNDLING OF SAINT JEAN LE ROND 

BETWEEN Jean d'Alembert and the other friends 
of Madame du Deffand, who have been described 
in the preceding chapter, there lies the gulf of a far- 
reaching and most significant distinction — a distinc- 
tion only to be comprehended by realising that they 
belonged to the old order of things, while he was 
emphatically of the new. The Due and Duchesse 
de Luxembourg, the Chevalier d'Aydie, the Marquis 
d'Uss^ the Comte d'Anlezy and the Marquise du 
Deffand herself were all the descendants of noble 
families, and members of the privileged class who, in 
theory, were supposed to derive a sufficient income 
from their territorial estates, and in practice did some- 
how generally contrive to get a living without working 
for it. All professions, except that of arms, were 
considered beneath their dignity, and it is only right 
to admit that from that profession, which in those 
days usually involved active service, there were few 
indeed who recoiled. All the men in the group just 
enumerated, without excepting even the poor de- 
formed Comte d'Anlezy, had been soldiers at some 
period of their lives, and in the chronicles of the 
times we rarely encounter a nobleman of whom the 
same may not be said. 

Renault, on the other hand, whose grandfather was 
a prosperous bookseller and his father a farmer-general, 
belongs to a rather different category, but one equally 
105 



io6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

characteristic of the Ancien Regime, in that he was 
born to easy circumstances and an inheritance of 
patronage which made his success in the legal pro- 
fession almost a foregone conclusion. It is true that 
he had plenty of brains and was reputed to work hard, 
but it is scarcely likely that a modern judge or barrister 
would be much impressed by the severity of his 
labours. Pont de Veyle, though created a count, was 
born into the same legal caste, which had a recognised 
status of its own, below that of the nobility but 
superior to the bourgeoisie proper. His father was 
a lawyer, and in a half-hearted fashion he, for a time, 
followed the same profession, but threw it up, and, 
having abundant interest at Court, obtained first the 
sinecure of Reader to the King, and then a more im- 
portant but scarcely more onerous position, corre- 
sponding in some rough fashion to that of First Lord 
of the Admiralty. 

D'Alembert was very far, as we shall see, from pos- 
sessing any of the advantages of birth, and his life 
is one long record of poverty and strenuous labour. 
In this, as in other respects, he was a typical repre- 
sentative of that rising party just beginning to make 
its power felt and destined in the end to undermine 
the old order of things in France, the party of the 
Encyclopedia. Like him, its leaders were nearly 
always men of obscure origin and scanty means. 
Thus Diderot was the son of a cutler, Morellet of a 
stationer, Marmontel of a small mMayer. In another 
matter of even greater moment the difference between 
the two classes is not less sharply defined. The 
older generation, though more often than not irre- 
ligious, were seldom professed unbelievers — in fact, 
so far as theory went, they were not perhaps generally 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 107 

unbelievers at all. Madame de Luxembourg was, if 
we may believe Walpole's good-natured description, 
a dutiful daughter of her Church, so far at least as fear 
of the devil confers a claim to that title. Madame du 
Deffand, towards the end of her life, made more than 
one effort to se faire devote, or, in English idiom, to 
•'get religion"; but the process bored her as much 
as did the abortive attempt of earlier days to be 
reconciled with her husband, and she gave it up in 
despair. She never professed unbelief, however 
(according to Madame de Genlis she had never taken 
the trouble to think out the question), and, as has been 
already said, attended High Mass at her parish church 
(St Sulpice), and had besides a reserved seat in the 
convent chapel of St Joseph. H^nault, when too 
infirm to leave the house, had Mass said regularly 
in a private oratory, and could never bring himself to 
approve of Voltaire's attacks upon revealed religion. 
The Chevalier d'Aydie might, after his reformation 
fairly pass as a not unworthy specimen of the Christian 
gentleman. 

D'Alembert, though a man of high principle and 
exemplary life (attributes which can by no means be 
claimed for the Encyclopedists generally), was in his 
views fundamentally and avowedly anti-Catholic, and, 
it must be confessed, anti-Christian. There can 
be little doubt that it was through his influence that 
Julie de Lespinasse became in after life identified 
with the Encyclopedic party. Between the man of 
thirty-six and the girl of twenty-one there was, from 
the first, a strong attraction of mutual sympathy, 
arising perhaps in some degree from the remarkable 
similarity of their fortunes. 

" All seemed made to unite us," says d'Alembert, 



io8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in that tragical outpouring of a broken heart in which 
his anguish found expression after her death. " Both 
without father or mother, brother or sister, famiHar 
from the first moment of our Hves with heartless 
desertion, misery and injustice, Nature seemed to have 
sent us into the world that we might be all in all 
to each other." 

In his case, however, the roles of the respective 
parents were reversed, for his father proved himself 
to be by no means deficient in natural feeling, while 
his mother, Madame de Tencin, surpassed even Gas- 
pard de Vichy in heartlessness and callous cruelty. 
One service only — and that a most involuntary one — 
she ever did her son, since it must have been from 
her that he inherited those commanding intellectual 
powers which by her were employed for purposes 
widely different from those of science and literature. 
The daughter of a provincial lawyer, she began her 
career as a nun, notorious for her beauty, intelligence, 
and infamous life. The sisterhood in which her lot 
had been cast was of an easy-going type, by no means 
unusual in those days, and had successfully defied all 
the attempts of their diocesan to enforce a somewhat 
stricter discipline. Yet even this indulgent com- 
munity had not reckoned on the honour of harbour- 
ing a recognised demi-mondaine, and it was with the 
mutual contentment and connivance of all concerned 
that she quitted this asylum for the larger life of Paris. 
Once there Madame de Tencin (who owed this brevet 
title either to her status in "religion," or to the rank 
of Marquise conferred on her in later life) made such 
good use of her talents for intrigue, both political and 
amatory, that she was never obliged to return to the 
cloister, and ultimately obtained a dispensation from 




MADAME DE TENCIN 

FROM AN ENGRAVING IN THE BIBLIOTHfegUE NATIONALE 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 109 

the Pope, who compromised matters by creating her 
a canoness of some place unknown, to which, says 
Saint-Simon, she never went. As mistress of the 
infamous Abbe Dubois she obtained an influence in 
public affairs which she improved to such purpose as 
at last to realise her ambition of becoming, through 
the medium of her brother and instrument (Cardinal 
de Tencin, already mentioned in these pages), practi- 
cally a Minister of the Crown. 

To such far-reaching activity the duties of maternity, 
apart from the indecorum attaching to them in the 
circumstances, would certainly have offered an incon- 
venient interruption. Madame de Tencin accordingly 
when, in November 1717, she became a mother, cut 
the Gordian knot by the simple expedient of ordering 
her child to be exposed on the steps of the Church of 
Saint Jean le Rond.^ The poor baby was rescued by 
the police and received into the cold bosom of public 
charity, a foster-mother at five francs a month being 
found for him in the country. From the condition in 
which, at the end of six weeks, he was discovered, it 
is not likely that his nurse would long have continued 
to enjoy her salary, but deliverance was at hand. His 
father, the Chevalier Destouches, a man of dissolute 
life but not of inhuman nature, had meanwhile re- 
turned from a foreign mission to Paris, and set himself 
at once to seek for the child. The abominable mother 
refused at first to give him any indication concerning 
its fate, but Destouches was resolute and happily not 
too late. He found the poor little mite in such a state 
as was to be expected of a child whose first bed had 
been on the cold stones (and that on a winter night), 
and who had since for six weeks enjoyed the benefits 

^ Near Notre Dame. It has been long pulled down. 



no A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of public nursing at four shillings a month. His head, 
we are told, was " no bigger than an apple," his fingers 
" the size of needles." For hours his father drove 
about Paris holding in his arms the infant, whom he 
had wrapped in his own cloak, and endeavouring to 
find some human-hearted woman who, for such a 
modest sum as he could afford to pay, would under- 
take the duties of nurse. Nobody at first seemed 
willing to accept the responsibility of a nursling ap- 
parently doomed to death, but at last a glazier's wife, 
a kind soul if ever there was one, was moved to 
motherly pity at the sight of the suffering innocent, 
and by unremitting care actually nursed him into 
something approaching health. 

In her charge he was left till old enough to be 
sent to school. His father visited him frequently, his 
detestable mother only once. The little Jean, who 
was then seven years old, always remembered what 
took place at that single interview. Destouches, 
whose importunities had prevailed upon Madame 
de Tencin on this one occasion to accompany him, 
remarked to her in a tone of reproach: "You must 
allow, madame, that it would have been a pity if this 
dear little fellow had been left to perish." "Oh, if 
you are going to begin scolding, I'm off," flippantly 
replied Madame de Tencin, rising as if to depart. 
That craving for poetic justice which is inherent in 
the human breast gave rise to a tradition that in 
after years Madame de Tencin, realising that she 
was the mother of a distinguished man, repented 
of her determination to disown him, and that her 
overtures to him were sternly and coldly rejected. 
But d'Alembert himself declared that there was not 
a word of truth in this dramatic legend. She never 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 1 1 1 

made any advances to him, he said, and if she had 
he would have accepted them ; he would have been 
glad to have a mother at any price. In like manner 
the world on her death found it hard to believe that 
she had bequeathed her whole fortune to a stranger, 
and invented a story that it had in part, at least, been 
left in trust for her son. But that son knew better. 
" She never had a thought for me in her lifetime," he 
said, " why should she have a thought for me in her 
death ? " 

The case is almost aggravated by the curious 
circumstance that this unnatural mother was, appar- 
ently, a most good-natured woman, and in effect by 
no means incapable of doing a kind action. Marmon- 
tel, who, at the beginning of his career, benefited by 
her patronage (for she liked clever men, and was a 
pioneer in the fashion of literary salons), has with 
much humour recorded the impression of sincerity 
and kind-hearted simplicity which she made upon 
his inexperienced mind. No one who has read 
her letters to the Due de Richelieu, written when 
she was at the height of her political power, can 
fail to be struck by her perpetual assumption of an 
affectionate interest in the little de Fronsac, her 
correspondent's son, and the minute details into 
which she enters concerning his manners, habits, 
acquirements and all such matters as are naturally 
dear to a father's heart. Taken in conjunction with 
her callous abandonment of her own child, this 
affectation of a quality, in itself so pleasing and 
womanly, inspires an almost greater repulsion than 
any other part of her character. 

We return to the fortunes of little Jean Baptiste 
Lerond (so baptised, I need scarcely explain, from 



112 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the locality in which he was discovered). His father, 
who died when the boy was nine years old, bequeathed 
him an annuity of 1 200 francs, and a recommendation 
to the care of the Destouches family, with which they 
honourably complied. By their influence Jean was at 
the age of twelve removed from his modest school 
in the Faubourg St Antoine to the famous College 
des Quatre Nations, now represented, so far as it still 
exists, by the Bibliotheque Mazarin and the Institut 
de France. This institution had been founded by 
Cardinal Mazarin for the gratuitous instruction of 
boys belonging to the higher classes, the greater 
number of scholars being noblemen's sons, and, 
according to the standard of the times, their require- 
ments, mental and physical, were liberally provided 
for. From the modern point of view, it might con- 
ceivably seem a den of hardship and cruelty, and in 
this place we may note that the French schoolboy of 
that day, unlike his successor, participated to the full 
with his British compeer in the privilege of receiving 
corporal punishment.^ For a boy so clever and hard- 
working as Jean, however, even this system would 
have few terrors, and he speedily achieved distinction 
in all his classes, and at the hours of recreation 
doubtless^ played happily enough at barres in the 

^ Mercier, in his "Tableau de Paris," gives a lurid picture of the 
cruelty with which flogging was practised at this very " College des 
Quatre Nations." He tells a scarcely credible story of a porter stabbed 
to death in a scuffle by one of the bigger boys who refused to submit to 
his punishment. 

2 Mazarin had intended the College course to comprise instruction in 
riding, fencing and dancing, but this excellent provision was found to be 
too expensive, and d'Alembert never had the benefit of these gentle- 
manly accomplishments. During one of his visits to Prussia he writes 
to Julie, in giving an account of a Court ball : " You may be sure I did 
not dance, but if I had wished, I might have danced with princesses." 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 113 

big flagged courtyard which remains to this day. 
At eighteen he took his Bachelor of Arts degree 
(for school and university courses were then dove- 
tailed into each other in a manner rather difficult of 
comprehension to moderns) read law for two years, 
dabbled in medicine, and, finally, having discovered 
that his true bent was mathematical, settled down, 
at the age of twenty, to the study of the exact 
sciences. 

He was now once more living under the roof of his 
kind nurse, Madame Rousseau, for whom he always 
entertained a devoted attachment, sufficient in itself 
to refute the charges of coldness and ingratitude 
sometimes brought against him. His annuity of fifty 
pounds brought affluence to the humble household, and 
he himself, by sharing their frugal meals, and other- 
wise exercising the utmost economy, was able to 
devote his whole attention to mathematics, and to 
dispense with the taking of pupils, which he regarded 
(and in his own case doubtless with justice) as an 
indefensible waste of time. By degrees the 
publication of various scientific works brought him 
reputation, though no great increase of income, and 
about a year or two before his first meeting with 
Julie de Lespinasse he had become known to the 
general public through his connection with the 
Encyclopedia. Of this remarkable production, 
destined under its inoffensively sounding name to 
furnish the battleground for internecine party strife, 
more will hereafter be said. For the present it is 
sufficient to observe that Diderot, having been 
commissioned by the booksellers (as publishers were 
then frankly denominated) to undertake the editor- 
ship of this vast publication, invited d'Alembert, for by 



114 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

that name ^ of doubtful origin he had elected to call 
himself, to be his coadjutor. The Introduction or Pre- 
liminary Discourse was written by him, and appeared 
at the end of 1752 along with several essays on general 
subjects. This first excursion into non-scientific 
regions established his reputation as a man of 
literature, and also as a formidable controversialist, 
and procured him the undying hatred of the clerical 
party owing to the aggressively unorthodox bias 
which he took no great pains to conceal. Some 
satirical remarks, moreover, on the relations of literary 
men with their patrons, gave umbrage to divers exalted 
persons who had begun to interest themselves in the 
rising genius, and even the good-natured President 
Renault took mortal offence because his cherished 
*' Abr^ge Chronologique " was not selected for special 
mention in the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclo- 
pedia as one of the great historical works of the day. 
It is impossible not to admire the independence 
shown by d'Alembert in this matter, for he had to 
resist the solicitations not only of interest but of 
friendship. Madame du Deffand, at this time his 
chosen confidante and sympathiser, was most anxious 
that he should be on good terms with Renault, but 
he was adamant to her entreaties. 

"Can you really think, madame," he writes, "that 
I ought to mention the ' Abrege Chronologique ' in a 
work destined to celebrate the great geniuses of the 
nation and the works which have really contributed 
to the progress of letters and science ? I grant you, 
it is a useful work, and handy enough, but that is all 

^ M. Joseph Bertrand hazards the conjecture that this name may form 
an anagram of his earlier appellation, thus : Baptiste Lerond =^ d'Alembert, 
soit ! 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 115 

there is to it. That is what literary people think, 
and that is what the world will say when the president 
is no more, and when I myself am no more. I do 
not wish to incur the reproach of having given 
exaggerated praise to anyone." 

Matters were not conspicuously mended by the 
article on Chronology in the Encyclopedia itself, 
which was also entrusted to d'Alembert, and in which 
the president's magnum opus was briefly mentioned 
as one of several good chronological abridgements. 
Yet, to the credit of the Ancien Regime be it said, 
neither his uncompromising independence nor his 
extreme poverty prevented d'Alembert from achiev- 
ing a considerable social success in some of the most 
aristocratic of Parisian circles. His popularity was 
in the first instance owing to a remarkable gift of 
mimicry, but as his intellectual powers gradually 
became known they met with due recognition from 
a society which, however grave its defi.ciencies, was 
most generous in appreciating every form of talent. 
Among the persons of distinction who were first in 
welcoming him to their houses may be mentioned 
Madame Geoffrin, the Duchesse du Maine, the 
President Renault, and last, but not least, Madame 
du Deffand herself. 

This lady had from the first a strong liking for 
d'Alembert, which was in no way diminished by his 
rather ferocious spirit of independence. It was one 
of her most cherished illusions that she enjoyed plain 
speaking ; and so, no doubt, she did under the form 
which it assumes in d'Alembert's letters to her written 
during the early days of her friendship. Few things 
are so intoxicating to a clever woman as the homage 
paid to her intellect by a man of genius whose profes- 



ii6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

sions and practice alike convince her that only to 
intellect would such homage be conceded. To be con- 
sulted concerning the literary projects of this brilliant 
Ishmael, to be made the confidante of his depreciatory 
judgments upon other writers (she had not sufficient 
loyalty really to resent his snubbing of Renault), all 
this was delightful flattery indeed, the more so because, 
at the time, it was undoubtedly sincere. Their opin- 
ions of each other were, as will hereafter appear, des- 
tined to undergo considerable modification, but in the 
mean while d'Alembert was one of the most assiduous 
frequenters of Madame du Deffand's salon, and we 
shall presently see that her friendship, even against 
his will, was of effectual service to him. 

At the period which we have now reached, d'Alem- 
bert was, as has already been said, between thirty- 
six and thirty-seven years of age. He was not 
commonly supposed to be remarkable for physical 
attractions. The memoirs of the time are full of 
allusions to his small, meagre figure, insignificant face, 
and shrill, falsetto voice. Yet the portrait by Latour 
taken about this date,^ with its charming reproduction 
of that satirical but not unkindly expression generally, 
on his own showing, attributed to him, scarcely bears 
out these disparaging commentaries. A man of blame- 
less life, he did not, of course, escape the stream of 
vile innuendo with which so rare a phenomenon was 
in those days invariably greeted. It is one of the 
finest points in his character that he never yiielded to 
the temptation, particularly alluring to a Frenchman, 
of meeting these insults with boastful tales of imaginary 
conquests. He was content to speak of his life as 
it really was and as it lay open to the eyes of all the 

^ In 1753- 




D'ALEMBERT 

FROM THE PASTEL BY I.ATOUR IN THE MUS^K DE SAINT QUENTIN 



THE FOUNDLING OF ST JEAN LE ROND 117 

world. Work, especially scientific work, was to him 
the main object of existence, and so far he had found 
no other which could for a moment be placed in com- 
petition with it. 

" If you only knew the sweetness and restfulness 
of geometry ! " he writes to Madame du Deffand, who 
had urged him to devote his time to more popular 
subjects, "and then the dunces never read you, and 
so can neither praise nor blame you ! . . . Ah ! if you 
knew all the fine things I am writing now which no one 
will ever read. . . . Geometry is my wife, and I would 
fain be a true husband." 

Yet even he, indefatigable worker as he was, was 
so far of his century that he seems to have always 
kept his evenings free for recreation. Play and opera 
and supper-party had all a liberal share in the disposi- 
tion of his time, and his worst enemies never denied 
that he could be excellent company. After the severe 
labour of the morning, his spirits seemed to rise like 
those of a boy out of school, and his constant flow of 
satirical humour, pointed by occasional samples of most 
artistic mimicry, often kept his companions laughing 
for hours together. 

Such was d'Alembert when he first made the 
acquaintance of one destined to enlarge his views 
of life, by introducing him to hitherto undreamt-of 
possibilities, alike of happiness and of suffering. 



CHAPTER X 

PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 

MADAME DU DEFFAND'S quarters at St 
Joseph were, as d'Alembert elegantly expressed 
it, " a devil of a way " from his modest lodging over 
the glazier's shop in the Rue Michel le Comte, that 
narrow, quaint old street where a visitor can still fancy 
himself back in the Paris of the eighteenth century. 
Her former abode had been much nearer him, yet, 
despite this increased distance, his letters to her 
during that absence in the country so often alluded 
to contain many promises of continuing to visit her 
frequently on her return. One condition, however, 
he is inclined to make — namely, that he shall see her 
only tHe-^-tUe. Either he will dine with her (Madame 
du Deffand was at this time forming resolutions, which 
she never carried out, of going to bed earlier, and 
coming down in time for the midday dinner) or he 
will arrive at the beginning of the evening and vanish 
before her other guests appear. The truth is that he 
was then out of conceit with the world in general, and 
with the childlike naivete which is such an endearing 
characteristic of his sex, and which seems to be most 
strongly developed in its ablest members, he pours 
out his grievances to this sympathising correspondent, 
accompanied by assurances that they do not affect 
him in the least. He is not making any money, and 
the Academy won't elect him, and people are saying 
horrible things about his writings, and the President 

ii8 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 119 

Hdnault is, on chronological grounds, mortally offended 
with him, and — "/ don't care!" He never accepts 
invitations now (going regularly to the Opera, however), 
is in bed every night by nine, and no life ever suited 
him so well, and he means to keep to it, etc. etc. etc. 

D'Alembert, it may be observed, was always rather 
in the habit of representing himself as a recluse, a very 
frequent pose with the people of that day, and appar- 
ently compatible with what to the degenerate twentieth 
century appears a considerable amount of dissipation. 
In the present instance, however, his professions seem 
to have been for a time quite genuine, but the mood 
which dictated them passed away. Not long after 
Madame du Deffand's return to Paris we find him 
established as a regular member, perhaps next to 
H^nault the most important member, of her evening 
circle, and when she went out to supper it seems to 
have been almost as much a matter of course for him 
to be included in the invitation as for Julie de Lespin- 
asse herself. 

The mention of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse suggests 
the probable clue to d'Alembert's change of attitude. 
We have seen how deep was the impression which 
the young girl from the first made upon him, Intellect 
was the god of his idolatry, but perhaps even Julie's 
intellectual powers commanded less of his admiration 
than did the perfect bearing which, as he told her, she 
had apparently acquired by instinct. Under all his 
assumption of independence there lay a rather painful 
consciousness of his own deficiencies in the article of 
breeding — deficiencies which, according to Madame 
du Deffand, were unfavourably commented upon on 
his first appearance in society. It is easy to under- 
stand that the glazier's household would be scarcely 



I20 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the place to learn manners, and, though most of his 
fellow pupils at the College des Quatre Nations were 
of good family, the school life of the time was too 
rough and hard to have a particularly refining influ- 
ence. Between Julie and him a humorous under- 
standing seems to have grown up that she was in 
these matters to be his mentor. Thus in one of his 
letters to her, during his visit to the King of Prussia, 
he banteringly tells her that she must not expect to 
find his table manners improved by keeping royal 
society, as Frederic himself sets him a very bad 
example. While Julie lectured him on deportment, 
he in turn lectured her on the moral obligation of 
cheerfulness and the duty of eschewing the minor 
social fictions, neither of which lessons came easily 
to a temperament distinguished by frequent variations 
of mood and a sensitive anxiety to please. Their 
friendship early noticed by at least one sympathetic 
observer,^ grew on the man's side all the sooner 
into love, that as yet his only affair of the heart had 
been a very innocent and rather silly flirtation with one 
of his nurse's daughters, strongly disapproved by 
Madame du DefTand, who perhaps feared that in a 
man of his honourable character the result might be 
a permanent entanglement. 

In English novels, and to a great extent in English 
life, an offer of marriage is regarded as the natural 
outcome of falling in love, and even the more prudent 
countrymen of d'Alembert expressed some surprise 
as year after year went by leaving him still an ob- 
viously devoted lover, and yet to all appearance not 
a matrimonial suitor. At the present stage of affairs, 
however, he might certainly plead with truth, as he 

1 Marmontel. 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 121 

pleaded less convincingly twelve years later, that he 
was too poor to keep a wife. Shortly before, when 
declining a lucrative post offered him at Berlin by the 
great Frederic, he had written: "My fortune is less 
than moderate, my whole income only amounts to 
1 700 francs a year " (rather over 70 pounds). Of 
this sum 1200 francs, or about 50 pounds, were be- 
queathed him, it will be remembered, by his father, 
the remainder was derived from the Academy of 
Sciences, of which he was a member. For his ser- 
vices as joint editor, he was also receiving from the 
publishers of the Encyclopedia another 1200 francs 
a year, besides some additional bonuses, but this was 
not a resource to be reckoned upon, as the Encyclo- 
pedia might, at any moment, be stopped by Govern- 
ment. As for his other literary work, he had 
expected (so he told Madame du Deffand) that the 
" Miscellaneous Essays " might bring him in as much 
as two or three hundred pounds, but it looked as if 
twenty would be much nearer the mark. It is true 
that Frederic, though disappointed in his design of 
securing this scientific genius for his own service, 
had magnanimously bestowed upon him another fifty 
pounds annually by way of pension. But even a fixed 
income of 120 pounds (not a penny of which was de- 
rived from capital), plus some uncertain additions 
amounting, at the very outside, to another 100 pounds, 
was scarcely sufficient to commence housekeeping upon 
in Paris, where the President Henault, in his young 
days, with an allowance of 250 pounds from his parents, 
for pocket money only, had thought himself exceed- 
ingly ill-treated. 

I have gone at some length into this question 
of income, not merely to account for d'Alembert's 



122 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

backwardness as a suitor, but because a recent French 
writer has seen good to dispute his reputation for 
disinterestedness and honourable poverty, and, in 
particular, reproaches him with accepting the above- 
mentioned pension from Frederic. But such inter- 
national gratuities were then the recognised method 
for encouraging scientific and literary activity, and 
no discredit was attached by public opinion to receiv- 
ing them. The reproach is in the present instance 
rendered especially unjust by the fact that d'Alembert, 
though his unorthodoxy in religion and, still more, 
in music (!), had just forfeited his chance of a pension 
from the Home Government, and Frederic's benefac- 
tion was, by this free-thinking monarch, largely de- 
signed as a solatium. 

There is yet another aspect of this question which 
well deserves consideration. Is there not, after all, 
something to be said for a society in which a man so 
poor as d'Alembert was received on equal terms with 
Renault, and others much richer even than he ? 
Arthur Young's remarks upon this excellent char- 
acteristic of the Parisian beati monde are well worth 
recalling here. 

" The society for a man of letters, or who has any 
scientific pursuit, cannot be exceeded. ... I should 
pity the man who expected, without other advantages 
of a very different nature, to be well received in a 
brilliant circle at London, because he was a fellow 
of the Royal Society. But this would not be the 
case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at 
Paris : he is sure of a good reception everywhere." 

Yet this shrewd observer does not fail to record 
some other considerations inclining the balance 
against Paris as an abode for people of small means. 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 123 

"Walking, which in London is so pleasant and so 
clean that ladies do it every day, is here a toil and 
fatigue to a man, and an impossibility to a well-dressed 
woman. ... I saw a poor child run over and probably 
killed, and have been myself many times blackened 
with the mud of the kennels. . . . If young noblemen 
at London were to drive their chaises in streets with- 
out footways as their brethren do at Paris, they would 
speedily and justly get very well threshed or rolled 
in the kennel. This circumstance renders Paris an 
ineligible residence for persons that cannot afford to 
keep a coach ; a convenience which is as dear as at 
London. The fiacres, hackney-coaches, are much 
worse than at that city ; and chairs there are none, 
for they would be driven down in the streets. To 
this circumstance, also, it is owing that all persons 
of small or moderate fortune are forced to dress in 
black, with black stockings.^ 

In justice to the Ancien Regime we must add his 
concluding reflection : 

"With the pride, arrogance, and ill-temper of 
English wealth this could not be borne, but the pre- 
vailing good-humour of the French eases all such 
untoward circumstances." 

Young's statements concerning the danger and dis- 
comfort of walking in Paris are confirmed, with the 
addition of many lurid details, by French contem- 
porary writers such as Mercier and Restif de la 

1 This does not seem to our ideas a very terrible privation, but we 
must remember that men had not yet decided on immolating the pictur- 
esque in dress to the convenient, and that women never thought about the 
convenient at all. In the opinion of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse the ideal 
gala suit for a gentleman included a brown coat embroidered in silver, 
with lining and vest of pale yellow — a scheme of colour which may well 
stir some of us to unavailing regrets. 



124 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Bretonne. Not only were there no sidepaths, but 
there was apparently no surface drainage worth 
taking into account. In rainy weather the filthy 
gutters, little better than open sewers, which flowed 
down the middle of the streets were swollen to an 
extent which made them exceedingly difficult to cross. 
This was the opportunity of the enterprising class 
known as ddcrotteurs, who kept a plank bridge 
mounted on rollers in readiness at the top of each 
street, and for the consideration of about half-a-farthing 
allowed foot-passengers to traverse it. These bridges 
had of course to be withdrawn in a hurry every time 
a carriage came that way, and the results to those 
who happened to be crossing on them were, as may 
be supposed, far from delectable. When we further 
consider that the street lamps were never lighted on 
nights when the moon according to the calendar 
should have been in evidence, and according to facts 
was frequently invisible, we begin to understand why 
d'Alembert laid so much stress upon the distance 
intervening between the Rue Michel le Comte and the 
Rue St Dominique. 

In Mercier's "Tableau de Paris" we have a tragic 
picture of a needy gentleman going out to dinner or 
supper at a smart house, and dressed for the occasion 
in a black velvet coat, adorned with gold lace, a gold- 
embroidered vest, an elaborate wig and (in flat con- 
tradiction to Young) white silk stockings. His only 
chance of arriving in presentable trim is to requisition 
the services of the ddcrotteurs who, besides providing 
the bridges above referred to, fulfilled the additional 
mission (from which their name was derived), of 
brushing and polishing foot-passengers into something 
approaching respectability. The alternative was of 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 125 

course to take a fiacre, for which the average fare 
seems to have been about the same as it is in London 
now — namely, a shilling (24 sous). There was a 
traditional belief that for short distances the legal 
price only amounted to sixpence, but this view was 
resisted by the cabmen with all that stubborn tenacity 
and bewildering eloquence which, in every country 
and period, have distinguished this courageous class of 
men. Almost the only amusing scene in Marivaux's 
dreary novel "Marianne" represents a pitched battle 
on this very point between Marianne's mistress (a 
linendraper) and a dissatisfied cabman, to whom the 
terrified heroine secretly slips an extra fourpence, 
thus getting rid of him, to her own relief and the 
intense disgust of her more spirited employer. 

Shilling cab-fares become a serious consideration 
where the whole income, as in d'Alembert's case, is 
under 200 pounds. As a set-off we may reckon 
a considerable supply of good dinners and suppers, 
for in the eighteenth century Parisian hospitality 
was not the ethereal affair that it is in the twentieth. 
But, unluckily, d'Alembert, like most brain-workers, 
suffered too much from his digestion to appreciate 
these advantages at their -proper value. He had the 
true dyspeptic's craving for simple fare and the true 
dyspeptic's intolerance towards all who were fortunate 
enough to be able to enjoy their food. He is half in- 
clined to trace Madame du Deffand's blindness to her 
love of good living. When enjoying the royal hospi- 
tality at Sans Souci he lectures the great King on in- 
dulging too freely in fruit. He writes pathetically to 
Julie that the highly spiced made dishes of the Prussian 
Court dinners will be the ruin of him. He wants 
plain broth and plain boiled beef, and cannot get them. 



126 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Besides, he suffers from the want of his daily walks in. 
Paris. After all, it seems there was a good side to 
those toilsome pilgrimages from the Rue Michel le 
Comte to the convent of St Joseph, 

Theatre-going, his favourite recreation, would cost 
d'Alembert nothing at all. At the Comedie Fran^aise 
the price of admission to the pit or parterre, where, 
till the year 1782, no seats were provided, was nomin- 
ally one franc.^ But the actors had the right of giving 
away, beforehand, a large proportion, sometimes as 
much as five-sixths, of the total of the tickets, and the 
friends on whom they were bestowed were often able 
to retail them for three or even six times their original 
value. All men of any literary distinction, however, 
were, on the intercession of some, influential friend, 
granted the privilege of free entry. In d'Alembert's 
case his entries, were allowed him at the request 
of the celebrated actress Mademoiselle Clairon, who 
had read his " Miscellaneous Essays " with admiration, 
and was always thought to be more or less in sympathy 
with the Encyclopedic party generally. Admission to 
the Opera had been already procured for him through 
the influence of President Renault, and we have seen 
how constantly he availed himself of this privilege. 
Amidst his truly encyclopedic studies he had found 
time to devote a good deal of attention to music, and 
it was his heterodoxy on this subject, even more than 
on theology or science, which brought him into dis- 
repute with the followers of established tradition. 

The Encyclopedic, or, as its adherents styled it, the 
"philosophic," movement was beginning to make itself 
felt in all directions. In history, science, art, litera- 
ture, ethics, might be traced the growth of a new 
^ At the Opera, according to Rousseau, it was two francs. 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 1C17 

spirit, which, in its various manifestations, seemed to 
divide the pubHc into two camps, and was greeted on 
one side with fervent enthusiasm, on the other with 
the fiercest opposition. In more modern times it 
might be both possible and instructive to discover a 
chain of connection which should unite into one con- 
crete whole "The Origin of Species," the pictures 
of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Operas of 
Wagner, the political economy of Ruskin, the novels 
of Thomas Hardy and the plays of Mr Bernard Shaw. 
But in the days of the Encyclopedia the revolt against 
convention invaded the different provinces of intellec- 
tual activity almost simultaneously, and the lines on 
which it proceeded were far more narrowly traced than 
in the nineteenth century, and hence tended, at least 
in appearance, to a much greater unity of purpose. It 
may seem far-fetched to enumerate the controversy 
concerning French versus Italian music as one of the 
effects of the Encyclopedic movement, but it was evi- 
dently so regarded by contemporaries, and the most 
active partisans on the side of musical innovations — 
Grimm, Diderot, Rousseau, and d'Alembert himself — 
were among the recognised leaders of the philosophi- 
cal party. 

The quarrel arose after this fashion. In the 
autumn of 1752 an Italian company visited Paris, and 
were allowed to perform at the Opera House, which 
at that time adjoined the Palais Royal. They gave 
several pieces by Pergolesi and other Italian com- 
posers which were hailed by a large proportion of the 
audience as a welcome variation from the so-called 
French music of Lulli, Rameau, and their followers. 
In the conservative section of the public, on the other 
hand, they excited a disapprobation quite as intelligent 



128 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

as that which Wagner within our own memories 
aroused in the British concert goer, and a great deal 
more violent. D'Alembert in one of his letters to 
Madame du DefFand describes the opening of the fray- 
in terms which leave no doubt as to his own opinion 
concerning its merits. 

" We have been having some excellent Italian 
music these last three months. This music is really a 
new language to us French people, and far superior 
to ours in truthfulness, liveliness, and expression. I 
believe we are going to have a schism about it in the 
Opera, as bad as the one we have in the Church." 

A few days later : 

" People say I am at the head of the Italian faction, 
but I am not exclusive, and always ready to admire 
French music when it is good. All the same I believe 
that we are a thousand miles behind the Italians in 
this matter." 

For over a year the battle raged hotly. Not only 
did it supplant all other topics of conversation, but it 
gave rise to an enormous number of pamphlets, of 
which only two (both on the Italian side), are now 
remembered — "The Little Prophet of Boehmisch- 
broda," by Grimm, and Rousseau's " Letter upon 
French Music." " The Little Prophet" was a humor- 
ous production much admired by Voltaire, but 
Rousseau's contribution to the discussion was marked 
by his usual vituperative earnestness. He pours forth 
the vials of his wrath upon French composers, French 
music, French musicians, and the French language 
after a fashion which inclines us to consider the sub- 
sequent withdrawal of his right of free admission to 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 129 

the Opera a pardonable retort on the part of the 
authorities. He himself and his friends firmly believed 
that he went in danger of death, or at the very least 
of banishment, and it is certain that party feeling 
ran very high, and that the devotees of French nwisic, 
strong in the support of Madame de Pompadour, who 
had espoused their side, were anxious to enlist the 
authority of the Throne itself against their opponents. 
In order to realise the situation we must remember 
that the Opera, like the Comedie Francaise, was in 
direct dependence upon the King, the actors at both 
establishments being, theoretically, in his service, and 
known by the title of " Comediens du Roi," and his 
Majesty had an undoubted right to decide what music 
should be performed in his own theatre. 

But though engaged in an unequal contest, the 
partisans of Italian music held their own gallantly, 
and, with the exception perhaps of the brooding Jean- 
Jacques and the severe d'Alembert, seem to have got 
a great deal of amusement out of the fray. It was 
their custom on Opera nights,^ to muster in force in 
that corner of the pit immediately below the box set 
apart for the Queen. Their opponents, on their side, 
stationed themselves beneath the box reserved for 
the King, and the two parties were, hence, colloquially 
known as the Queen's and the King's Corner respec- 
tively. The strife of tongues was carried on with 
great spirit by these opposing factions until the con- 
servative party determined on bringing matters to 
a climax by a coup d'Mat. A Gascon composer, one 
Mondonville, much in favour at Court, had written a 
mediocre opera, which at this delicate conjuncture he 
decided upon producing. Though reckoning confi- 

^ Operatic performances were held only three times a week. 
I 



« 



130 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

dently on the support of Madame de Pompadour, and 
of the whole patriotic party, he felt a nervous terror of 
the formidable criticism of the "Queen's Corner," and 
entered into preliminary negotiations with the chiefs 
of that section, humbly promising that, if they would 
forbear from condemning his piece on the first night, 
he for his part would make it his business at once to 
meet their wishes by composing another opera quite 
in the Italian style. The revolutionary party were, 
according to Grimm, so delighted by the complacent 
self-sufficiency of this undertaking that they had some 
thoughts of agreeing to the compromise. But the 
decision was taken out of their hands by superior 
authority. On the day fixed for the first representa- 
tion of Mondonville's opera the whole pit was, by 
Madame de Pompadour's contrivance, filled, from 
twelve o'clock onwards, with the King's guards from 
Versailles. When the customary occupants of the 
Queen's Corner arrived at the usual hour they found 
their places taken, and were obliged to seek standing 
room either in "paradise" {i.e. the gallery) or in the 
corridors. They were unable to see the stage all 
evening, but vociferous applause from gallant and 
loyal occupants of the pit assured them that Mondon- 
ville's piece was enjoying a success unparalleled in 
the annals of the Opera. 

Backed by such irresistible arguments the triumph 
of French Opera was secure. When the Italian 
troupe was finally dismissed from Paris, which was 
not for some time later, Grimm proposed that the 
Queen's Corner should, as a parting stroke, attend their 
last performance in mourning. In case their places 
in the pit should again be usurped they were before- 
hand to secure two front boxes, and in that prominent 



PHILOSOPHY AND MUSIC 131 

position pay the last duties to Italian music by 
melancholy silence and, if possible, tears. The de- 
lightful boyishness of the proposition makes us rather 
regret that it was not adopted, for the sufficient 
reason, says Grimm, that "the mourners would in all 
probability have been requested to finish the funeral 
service in the parish church of the Bastille." As it 
was, d'Alembert, whose attitude in the discussion had 
made him obnoxious to Madame de Pompadour, found 
his hope of a pension from the King indefinitely 
deferred, and President H^nault, a devoted admirer 
of French music, had now a public as well as a private 
ground of enmity against him. He had the compen- 
sation, however, of making a proselyte in Julie de 
Lespinasse, who came to Paris just after the departure 
of the Italians, and while the echoes of the contro- 
versy still resounded. That d'Alembert soon con- 
verted her to his views ^ may be inferred from the 
humorous disapprobation expressed by Renault in 
the highly complimentary "portrait" already referred 
to, " You don't understand music a bit! " It is rather 
piquant to imagine d'Alembert playing airs from 
Italian compositions on the harpsichord and entreating 
his sympathising disciple to compare them with the 
home-grown productions which are now, unhappily, all 

'^ When Gluck, about twenty years later, electrified the musical world 
of Paris, Julie was among his warmest admirers, and in the midst of a 
very terrible personal trouble found some consolation in going over and 
over again to hear his opera of Orpheus. Though apparently not 
musical, in the strict sense of the term, she seems, by sheer force of in- 
telligence, to have acquired a position of authority as a critic of music no 
less than of literature. Grimm, writing a year after her death, observes 
that, if she were still alive, the war between the rival schools of Gluck and 
Piccini which was then raging, and which, unlike the earlier question of 
French versus Italian music, had created a schism within the Encyclopedic 
camp itself, would never have been permitted to attain its present 
proportions. 



132 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

that she can hope to hear at the Opera House. Then 
the president enters, and the subject must be changed 
with all convenient speed ! Every indication did 
indeed appear to show that destiny had, to use 
d'Alembert's own words, intended these two to be- 
long to one another all through life, but the result 
was far from being such as he then, with trembling 
hope, foresaw. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 

D 'ALE M BERT was certainly in this respect more 
fortunate than the conventional lover of romance 
— that he was far from having leisure to brood undis- 
turbed over his rising passion and the difficulties 
besetting it. To say nothing of scientific research, 
the work of the Encyclopedia, to which at this time 
he devoted himself unsparingly, made large demands 
upon his time and energy. Like most, we might almost 
say like all, of the leaders in this undertaking he had 
been religiously brought up. The teaching staff at 
the College des Quatre Nations, pious ecclesiastics of 
the Jansenist way of thinking, seem to have maintained 
pleasant and kindly relations with their gifted alumnus 
both during his school life and after it, and were at 
first not without hopes that under their influence 
he might bring his intellect to the support of their 
much controverted theological tenets. They lent him 
numerous books of devotion, by which, as is the wont 
of the natural man, and yet more of the natural boy, 
he was exceedingly bored, and when he amicably 
declined to pursue this line of study any further they 
suggested that he would perhaps find controversy 
more interesting. Anything like a train of reasoning 
had always a strong fascination for d'Alembert, and 
he managed to read through a large portion of the 
theologico - polemical works recommended to him 
with about the same degree both of interest and edi- 
133 



134 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

fication as that derived by Stalky and his friends from 
"Eric "and " St Winifred's." 

The theory that it was this intimate study of 
theology which drove d'Alembert into the anti- 
theological camp is tempting in its epigrammatic 
fitness, but probably far wide of the mark. Most 
likely he could not himself have clearly explained by 
what circumstance, or by whose influence, he was led 
to renounce all belief in revealed religion, for the 
truth is that scepticism was then in the air. To trace 
to its origin the great wave of free thought which in 
the eighteenth century swept over France would here 
be plainly impossible. It will be sufficient briefly to 
notice three great books, all dating from about the 
middle of the century, and supposed to indicate the 
high-water mark to which that incoming flood had by 
this time attained. These are Montesquieu's "Esprit des 
Lois," published in 1748 ; Buffon's " Natural History" 
{1749), and the Encyclopedia itself, of which the first 
volume appeared in 175 1. The casual modern reader 
unacquainted with the conditions under which these 
three works were produced might well feel some sur- 
prise at the storm of terrified rage excited by them in 
the clerical party. From a twentieth-century point of 
view the orthodoxy of the writers would seem, so far 
as outward expression is concerned, unimpeachable, 
and even a little excessive. But when circumstances 
are known to be such that no author can openly say 
what he really means, the art of reading between lines 
and interpreting reticences is brought to a perfection 
scarcely conceivable by those accustomed to a better 
condition of things. In the France of those days no 
book could, in the first place, be published at all unless 
it obtained the approval of a censor appointed for this 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 135 

purpose by Government. Once published it might at 
any moment be suppressed if anything of a seditious 
or irrehgious tendency was discovered and pointed out 
to the authorities by competent persons, and very 
serious consequences, extending to exile and imprison- 
ment and, by the letter of the law, even to death 
might befall both author and publisher. 

It is plain that under such a system no one who 
aimed at making himself heard could afford to display 
any open disrespect for established institutions, political 
or religious, and this the conservative party thoroughly 
understood, and were wary accordingly. In vain did 
Montesquieu lavish his pity on countries "so un- 
fortunate as to have a religion not given by God." 
The theologians were quite acute enough to see that 
for him all religions had a value differing in degree 
rather than in kind. In vain did Buffon censure the 
impiety of English scientists in endeavouring to bring 
the Deluge within the domain of physical law. They 
put the right interpretation on his grave profession of 
faith : " No characteristic of a miracle is so unmistak- 
able as the impossibility of explaining its effects by 
natural causes," and his careful enumeration of all the 
reasons which rendered untenable any but a miraculous 
explanation of the Flood as described in Genesis. In 
vain did d'Alembert, the hardest, though the most 
cautious, hitter of the three, profess his astonishment 
that divines should foresee any danger from "the 
weak attacks" of reason upon a Faith "sent down 
from Heaven to men," and "guaranteed by the 
promises of God Himself." His critics were fully 
sensible, as he certainly intended that they should be, 
of the irony underlying this, and in a yet more marked 
degree the following pronouncement : — 



136 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

" Besides, however absurd a religion may be (and 
only impiety could bring such a reproach against ours), 
it is never philosophers who destroy it. Even when 
they teach the truth, they content themselves with the 
bare demonstration, and do not force anyone to 
acknowledge it."^ 

Unlike the majority of modern English agnostics, 
d'Alembert, with all his party, fell into the grievous, 
but for them scarcely avoidable, error of identifying 
Christianity with the only form of it familiar to them- 
selves — with the Romish Church, that is, as it existed 
in France during that period of accumulated ineptitude 
and corruption preceding the great Revolution. E^ery 
attack on orthodoxy meant for him a blow struck 
against ignorance, deceitfulness, and intolerance, and 
that high standard of duty which, unlike many of 
the Encyclopedists, he had saved out of the wreck 
of religious beliefs, was only an additional motive 
force to urge him onward in the fray. 

The circumstances through which that blessed word 
Encyclopedia (sufficiently familiar, though in a slightly 
different connection, to modern ears) became the 
battle-cry of a disintegrating and reforming move- 
ment are, in themselves, by no means remarkable. 
Le Breton, a Parisian bookseller, or, as we should say, 
publisher, had formed the project of bringing out a 
French version of the " Cyclopedia, or Universal 
Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences," by Ephraim 
Chambers, published in 1727. Before the work of 
translation was accomplished the person to whom 
it had been entrusted died, and Le Breton thereupon 
had recourse to Diderot, who was known to possess 
the qualification, then rather unusual, of being a good 

^ " Discours preliminaire de I'Encyclopedie." 




DIDEROT 

AFTER GREUZE 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 137 

English scholar. His fertile brain conceived the idea 
of recasting the work of Chambers and giving to it 
a much wider scope.^ The scheme was approved by 
Le Breton, who, in partnership with three other 
publishers, undertook all the expenses of produc- 
tion. Diderot was appointed editor in chief at a salary 
of fifty pounds a year, and d'Alembert assistant-editor 
on the same terms. These two enlisted the services 
of some fifty or sixty collaborators, many of them 
distinguished men, who in most cases desired no 
payment for their contributions. The Encyclopedia, 
which appeared volume by volume, sold, when 
completed, for from thirty to forty pounds. The 
total profits of the publishers are said to have 
amounted to over ;^ 100,000, an enormous sum for 
that period. 

So remarkable a financial success bears sufficient 
testimony to the attraction possessed by any book 
which, under a despotic Government and an intolerant 
religious system, is thought to aim at the subversion of 
both these institutions — an attraction lacking to the 
best-advertised encyclopedia of our own experience. 
Such was indeed to some extent the object which 
Diderot and d'Alembert, ably supported by Voltaire 
and other coadjutors selected as sharing their 
opinions, had set before themselves. Though the 
fear of the censor was inevitably ever before their 
eyes, they still managed to insinuate their views in 
every possible connection, sometimes with much 
finesse, and sometimes after a fashion which reminds 
us of Mr Dick's Memorial and the head of Charles the 
First. But, as Mr John Morley has pointed out, we 

^The Encyclopedia of Chambers was comprised in two volumes ; 
that of Diderot extended over seventeen, besides seven of illustrations. 



138 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

should be doing the Encyclopedists a great injustice 
by supposing that their campaign was solely, or even 
primarily, one of destruction. The encouragement of 
industry, the diffusion of education, above all the 
promotion of better and more natural relations be- 
tween man and man, the inculcation of justice, integrity 
and humanity, were prominent items in their pro- 
paganda, and the eagerness with which these doctrines 
were received plainly showed that they appealed to 
aspirations already stirring in the hearts of many 
readers. 

These softer impulses, known in the language then 
current as the return to Nature and the cultivation of 
sensibility, did indeed almost everywhere show them- 
selves side by side with the fiercer instinct of revolt. 
Throughout the literature of the day their existence can 
plainly be traced, especially in that passion for English 
fiction which was just becoming a fashionable craze. 
The eyes of all the Encyclopedist faction were in 
those days turned longingly towards England as a 
country administered on principles of liberty, tolera- 
tion, and philanthropy which, though falling far short 
of latter-day aspirations, were much in advance of 
those acknowledged in France. Their Anglomania, 
as it was called, received a strong additional impetus 
from the publication of Richardson's novels, which were 
translated into French almost as soon as they appeared 
in English. That passion for accurate and realistic de- 
tail, which with Richardson was almost an obsession, 
had a strangely stimulating effect when contrasted 
with the complete artificiality of current French fiction. 
Besides this, the reading public had an admiration 
for virtue, quite as " Platonic " certainly as Carlyle's 
enthusiasm for silence, yet genuine in its way ; and 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 139 

the spectacle of Pamela emerging triumphant from 
every temptation, and rewarded with the heart and 
hand of her repentant admirer, appealed to their 
sym_pathies in a manner rather inexplicable at the 
present day. With the appearance of " Clarissa," 
that masterly picture of an ideal woman for which 
" Pamela " had been, as it were, the crude and clumsy 
study, public enthusiasm rose, more comprehensibly, 
to fever heat. The warm life which still palpitates 
through every page of those eight volumes seemed 
a veritable revelation to minds cloyed with perpetual 
unreality and convention. They were charmed more- 
over with the spirit of philanthropy which, within 
certain closely defined limits, is always conspicuous 
in Richardson's work. Even Lovelace, it will be 
remembered, was a good landlord, whose tenants 
prospered under his rule, and it was partly this 
characteristic of his which led Clarissa to think that 
he had in him the makings of a decent man. As for 
Pamela and her excellent (and most unreal !) parents, 
were they not glorious examples of natural worth 
triumphant over every disadvantage of humble station 
and commanding respect from all classes of society } 
The publication in 1761 of Rousseau's ** Nouvelle 
Heloise " marks a further development of the new 
fiction, and one more in harmony with national, or 
rather with racial, habits of thought. Our first impulse 
certainly on learning that some minds were able to 
trace an analogy between Rousseau's Julie and Richard- 
son's Clarissa is one of indignant amazement : but we 
must in justice remember that to Rousseau's public the 
conception of a girl who brings a past to the altar, 
but lives it down and becomes a model wife, was 
decidedly an effort in the direction of virtue, and one. 



I40 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

perhaps, more congenial to Latin ideals than that of 
an absolutely pure nature like Clarissa's. Proceeding 
in our comparison between the two authors we are at 
once struck by Rousseau's immeasurable inferiority 
to Richardson in the faculty of characterisation, a 
faculty indeed almost wholly lacking in Jean-Jacques. 
But on the other hand we must set that glowing passion 
for Nature, which Rousseau may be said t?o have first 
introduced into prose fiction, and that fermenting 
leaven of humanitarian democracy, hereafter to display 
itself more fully in " Emile " and the " Contrat Social." 
Neither of those mighty ideals was anywhere within 
the range of Richardson's accurate but restricted 
powers of vision. 

Plunged suddenly into this vortex of new ideas, 
Julie de Lespinasse assimilated them with the eager- 
ness which might be expected from a girl of ardent 
nature who had never yet tasted the joy of a free 
interchange of thought with men intellectually her 
superiors. It is plain that the books which were 
fashionable during the earlier years of her abode in 
Paris had a strong and lasting influence in fixing the 
bent of her opinions and sympathies. To the end 
of her life she prized the "immortal Richardson" 
above all other authors. She "read and re-read" 
him ; at first doubtless in translations, but afterwards 
in the original. " My soul throbs in unison with the 
broken heart of Clarissa," she writes twenty years 
after the date of her first acquaintance with that most 
lovable of heroines. She has a "passion" for Jean- 
Jacques, whose writings have, she admits, an almost 
dangerous fascination for her. She repeats the axioms 
of Montesquieu as if they were gospel. For years 
her cherished aspiration is to meet the author of the 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 141 

" Natural History," though when the introduction 
is at last, through the interposition of a good-natured 
friend accomplished, her disillusionment is bitter on 
hearing the great man reply to some critical remark 
about the difficulties of literary style : " Devil take it, 
that's another pair of shoes." ^ 

On their negative side, however, the new doctrines 
never obtained such complete mastery over her as 
over her mentor, d'Alembert, who had the courage, 
rare indeed at that epoch, to pass to his final account 
unsustained by the last rites of the Church, thus 
calmly forgoing his claim to Christian burial. Julie de 
Lespinasse could not bring herself, either during her 
lifetime or on her deathbed, to sever all outward con- 
nection with the Faith in which she had been brought 
up, but that the sceptical habit had invaded her whole 
mind, and left her doubtful, and sometimes less than 
doubtful, concerning the teachings of that Faith, no 
one familiar with her letters will deny. 

Meanwhile the Encyclopedia was pursuing its tri- 
umphant but by no means unobstructed career. The 
first two volumes had appeared and the third was in 
the press when (in February 1752) the whole work 
was suddenly suppressed by Government. For some 
time the storm raged fiercely, but at last blew over, 
and in November 1753, the prohibition was removed 
and the third volume permitted to appear. D'Alem- 
bert had during that year stood for election to the 
Academy, but withdrew his candidature on learn- 
ing that the King had personally interposed to 
prevent the nomination of some other aspirants, ob- 
noxious like himself to the ruling powers, and that 
a similar exercise of the royal prerogative was to be 
* Sleeves in the French idiom. 



142 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

dreaded in his own case. This reverse, which he was 
inclined to attribute even more to the hostile influence 
of President Renault than to the evil reputation of 
the Encyclopedia, was deeply felt by d'Alembert. In 
his letters to Madame du Deffand he is liberal in his 
"don't care" protestations with regard to this as well 
as other disappointments, but these lofty professions 
by no means imposed upon his quickwitted friend. 
She had set her heart upon seeing him a member of 
the Academy, and on her return to Paris began, in 
spite of his rather surly remonstrances, to work to- 
wards the accomplishment of that object. 

Mingled with her friendship for d'Alembert, there 
was a touch of personal ambition. " To make an 
Academician" was, for a Parisian lady, the highest 
test of social and intellectual supremacy. In the 
earlier part of the century it had been said that no- 
body who had not obtained the approval of Madame 
de Lambert stood a chance of being elected to the 
Academy. In days to come an impression of the same 
kind was to obtain concerning Mademoiselle de Les- 
pinasse. Madame du Deffand, who came between the 
two, coveted for her own part a share of this distinc- 
tion, and in view of the next vacancy among the Fotty 
commenced that system of wire pulling which, if we 
are to believe Daudet, is even now indispensable 
for obtaining entrance to the Academy. It was hard 
work, for one of the rival candidates had behind him 
a strong party, headed by a certain Duchesse de 
Chaulnes, who chanced to be one of Madame du 
Deffand's pet aversions, but was nevertheless a highly 
influential person. A vigorous campaign of canvassing 
ensued, under the able leadership of these feminine 
generals respectively. The good-natured president. 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 143 

who even when resentful was seldom vindictive, con- 
sented, on Madame du Deffand's entreaty, to overlook 
the delinquencies, chronological and musical, of her 
protege, and employed his influence, considerable in 
Court circles, to support the candidature of d'Alem- 
bert. Meanwhile Julie de Lespinasse looked on and 
learned her first lesson in that science of social 
diplomacy for which she was hereafter to attain such 
celebrity. 

The election took place at the end of November 
1754. To the last, the result seemed doubtful, for, 
setting aside the fascinations of the Duchesse de 
Chaulnes, a noted beauty and coquette, her favourite 
candidate, the Abbe de Boismont, was, in his clerical 
capacity, and having regard to the strong ecclesias- 
tical element within the Academy, a dangerous com- 
petitor for the sub-editor of the Encyclopedia. But in 
the end the claims of science prevailed over those of 
clericalism, and d'Alembert thus attained the honour, 
to which no Frenchman is ever in his heart insensible, 
of ranking among the " immortal " Forty. 

His position, both monetary and otherwise, hence- 
forth steadily improved, and for two or three years the 
work of the Encyclopedia proceeded in comparative 
tranquillity. But in 1757 another tempest arose, and 
one which had the disastrous effect of dividing the 
" philosophic " party against itself In the summer of 
1756 d'Alembert had allowed himself the much-needed 
holiday of a visit to Voltaire at his country house, Les 
Delices. For many years he had maintained a corre- 
spondence with the illustrious exile — the "patriarch" 
of the Encyclopedist faction — and the two great men 
professed a warm mutual admiration, which did not 
always prevent them from saying rather spiteful things 



144 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

behind each other's backs. At Les Delices, d'Alembert 
was of course introduced to all the leading men in 
Genevan society, including several Protestantministers, 
who were delighted to make the acquaintance of a 
person so distinguished. Himself endowed with all 
the characteristic virtues of Puritanism and with not 
a few of its characteristic defects, d'Alembert felt a 
natural affinity for these clear-headed, austere, argu- 
mentative disciples of Calvin, the rather because, like 
the Scottish Church in our own day, they had already, 
by almost insensible degrees, drifted far away from 
the hideous doctrines originally imposed upon them 
by their founder. It was, besides, an unusual ex- 
perience for him nowadays to be favourably regarded 
by ecclesiastics of any persuasion, and he determined 
that the intelligence and enlightenment of Geneva 
should, under the letter G., receive due honour at his 
hand in the forthcoming volume of the Encyclopedia. 
Unfortunately, his eulogium took the form of a 
statement that the Genevan clergy had virtually lapsed 
into Socinianism, and this, though from d'Alembert's 
point of view a most sincere compliment, was not so 
regarded by the persons chiefly concerned. The 
ministers, horrified, and no doubt in good faith, 
at the interpretation put upon their large-minded 
theories of Biblical criticism, convoked a synod for the 
express purpose of recording their protest against it. 
Nor was this the only trouble brought upon d'Alembert 
by his well-intentioned article on " Geneva." At the 
instigation, doubtless, of Voltaire, who had a grievance 
of his own against the Genevans on this subject, he 
had qualified his encomium by expressing regret that 
in a city otherwise so free from illiberal prejudices, 
the theatre, for which, as we know, d'Alembert had 



NEW THEOLOGY AND ITS EXPONENTS 145 

himself a strong liking, should be regarded as a device 
of Satan. This suggestion aroused the righteous in- 
dignation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that strangest 
censor of morals, who was now tending towards his 
final rupture with the Encyclopedists, and was not ill- 
pleased at the opportunity of avenging, on public 
grounds, his private (and chiefly imaginary) grievances 
aofainst them. With rather less than his usual 
eloquence, and even more than his usual wrong- 
headedness, he denounced the pernicious attempt of 
d'Alembert to corrupt the pure morality of Geneva by 
introducing such soul-destroying influences as those 
of the stage. D'Alembert replied, and a vigorous 
controversy ensued. 

There were difficulties from without no less than 
from within. The attempted assassination of the 
King by Damiens (in January 1757) had strengthened 
the antipathy of the ruling powers to any literature 
suspected of a subversive tendency. Early in 1759 
the Encyclopedia, which had now got as far as the 
seventh volume, was again suppressed. The prohibi- 
tion was soon withdrawn, but meanwhile d'Alembert, 
disgusted by such a combination of calamities, had de- 
cided on abandoning his editorial position. It must be 
owned that few things in his life became him less than 
this desertion, by which the whole burden of complet- 
ing the work was thrown upon his more loyal colleague, 
Diderot, who in vain entreated him to reconsider his 
decision. 

If we may believe Diderot's account of the matter, 
the standpoint assumed by d'Alembert was by no 
means remarkable for moral elevation. He was 
willing to go on, he said, if their employers, the four 
booksellers, would raise his fees. Fifty pounds a 



146 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

year, though worth perhaps three times as much then 
as now, was certainly no adequate recompense for 
duties so onerous and responsible as his ; but it ap- 
pears that he had received bonuses amounting to 
between three and four hundred pounds additional. 
Of this Diderot now reminded him, and was met with 
the surprised remonstrance, so strangely modern in its 
tone : "What, Diderot, are you taking sides with the 
publishers ? " 

Lest we should be inclined to judge d'Alembert too 
hardly, we must remember that he had already devoted 
ten years of his life to the Encyclopedia, that he had 
many other claims upon his attention, and that he 
continued to undertake the supervision of mathematical 
articles, and in other ways still made himself very use- 
ful to Diderot. The great work was finally completed 
in 1764. 



CHAPTER XII 

OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 

ROUSSEAU, as d'Alembert sarcastically observed, 
had this advantage over most persons who rail 
against the theatre, that he had himself had consider- 
able experience of the evil thing which he would fain 
have withheld others from touching. It was, indeed, 
mainly to his theatrical and operatic productions that 
he owed the first commencements of his fame ; but 
such irrelevant trifles as his own practice in any matter 
never interfered with the unselfish concern of Jean- 
Jacques for the morals of his fellow-creatures. 

His chief argument was grounded upon the pro- 
fligacy then a very general characteristic of the 
theatrical profession, and the corrupting influence 
thus exercised upon society in general ; and he under- 
took to prove that a virtuous life was, by the nature 
of things, incompatible with the duties of an actor, or 
more especially of an actress. The perpetual counter- 
feiting of the passions, the incessant appeal to public 
admiration, the elaborate personal adornment habitual 
on the stage must, in his view, inevitably entail the 
moral degradation of women obliged to practise them, 
and, once corrupted, the actresses (wicked creatures) 
were sure to drag down their male colleagues to their 
own level, 

D'Alembert, in his reply, did not attempt to deny 
that actresses were generally immoral, but he strenu- 
ously maintained that they were capable of much 
147 



148 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

better things. As it was, there were many who, in 
spite of every temptation, long retained their virtue, 
and the reason that so few persevered to the end was 
to be found in the fact that no encouragement to do 
so was offered them. If something were done in this 
direction they would, in his opinion, become "the 
best-conducted class of women in the community." 

In this last statement d'Alembert certainly makes 
some approach to the wilful exaggeration of his oppo- 
nent, yet perhaps the difference in their views con- 
cerning the robustness of female virtue is scarcely 
more than we might naturally expect to exist between 
a man of austere morals and a man notoriously the 
reverse. But d'Alembert undoubtedly put his finger on 
a crucial point in the controversy when he accounted 
for the prevalence of vice by the slightness of the en- 
couragement afforded to virtue. What, indeed, did it 
avail an actress to refuse the pleasures of sin when, 
by the mere fact of her profession, she remained, how- 
ever pure her life, excluded from all communion with 
the visible Church on earth, and, as devout Catholics 
were bound to believe, from all hopes of heaven 
hereafter ? Can we greatly blame the women of the 
Comedie Fran9aise for the shameless effrontery with 
which they flaunted their unauthorised husbands and 
illegitimate children when we remember that Christian 
marriage (and civil marriage did not then exist) was 
refused them so long as they remained on the stage ? 

It is much to the honour of the philosophic party 
generally that they were, like d'Alembert, earnest in 
their protest against this unjust and barbarous code. 
In an article in the Encyclopedia on the dramatic pro- 
fession, Voltaire takes the opportunity of represent- 
ing the very different attitude of clerical opinion in 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 149 

England, where he himself had witnessed the in- 
terment of " Mademoiselle Olfilds " ^ in Westminster 
Abbey, "side by side with Newton and the kings." 
There can be no doubt that, as he wrote, he was in 
his heart contrasting this stately ceremony with the 
stealthy, midnight burial of that never-forgotten friend 
of his youth, the gifted Adrienne Lecouvreur. More 
than once, throughout his later life, when the question 
of reconciliation with the Church arises, we find him 
repeating : " I don't want them to throw me in the 
gutter as they did with poor Lecouvreur." According 
to d'Alembert, it was on the ground of this terrible 
example that the "patriarch" justified his feigned sub- 
mission to ecclesiastical authority on his deathbed. 
" He had," adds d'Alembert calmly, "a great aversion, 
/ do not know why (!), to this method of interment," 
And chivalrously anxious for the honour of his ancient 
leader, now departed, he declares that he had en- 
couraged Voltaire in the subterfuge which, for him- 
self when his own hour came, he utterly disdained. 

The above phrase, "thrown in the gutter,"^ though 
commonly employed concerning the burial of excom- 
municated persons, must not be too literally taken, 
suggesting as it does a degree of horror in excess of 
the actual facts. It merely meant that the bodies of 
such persons might not rest in consecrated ground. 
Sometimes they were admitted to that portion of the 
cemetery reserved for unbaptised infants, but there 
were cases in which the clergy refused even this 
measure of hospitality to the dead. Then the civil 
authorities had to be approached, and their permission 
obtained for burial in some unhallowed and secluded 
spot. This was the only course possible in regard to 
1 Nance Oldfield. ^ Jett^ k la voirie. 



ISO A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Adrienne Lecouvreur, though the priest who excluded 
her body from the graveyard of her parish church 
had been in the habit of relying on her for assistance 
in his charities. An authorisation was granted by 
the Minister of Police for her interment by night in 
a remote corner at the edge of the Seine. One friend 
alone, a certain M. de Laubiniere, was permitted 
to attend her to her last resting-place. Voltaire, in 
the noble poem inspired by burning indignation at 
the treatment awarded to this genius of the tragic 
stage, has told us how her faithful friend "bore, in 
charity, that form but yesterday renowned for beauty, 
packed away in a hackney-coach, to the margin of our 
river." A hole was dug by two street porters, the 
body was hastily thrust in and covered with earth, 
and so, with less ceremony than is often bestowed on 
the funeral of a dog, the last rites were paid to this 
idol of the Parisian public. The exact position of her 
grave remained unknown to the world for nearly half- 
a-century, and was then discovered by workmen dig- 
ging the foundations of a house to be raised on that 
spot. During the Revolution her body was removed 
to a more decorous burial-place. 

The actor and actress were under the ban of the 
State no less than under that of the Church. Like 
the married women of our own country within the 
memory of some of us, they had no recognised exis- 
tence in law. Members of the Comedie Frangaise 
and of the Opera had, indeed, in their capacity of 
" King's Comedians," certain important privileges. 
They were exempt from the jurisdiction of the police 
and, in the case of women, from parental and marital 
control, but, on the other hand, they were in absolute 
subjection to the Gentlemen of the King's House- 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 151 

hold, who were entrusted with the duty of supervising 
them. Every action of their professional lives was 
regulated by this arbitrary authority, and any attempt 
at rebellion was promptly punished by an indefinite 
term of imprisonment. Yet it is the strangest 
characteristic of a strange situation that these out- 
lawed and excommunicated beings had by no means 
to complain of the social stigma which, in nations and 
periods otherwise far more tolerant, has often attached 
to their profession. An actress of any celebrity was 
made welcome in the most aristocratic Parisian circles, 
and not only great nobles, but their wives, took pride 
in numbering her among their acquaintance. The 
fine ladies of the Ancien Regime did not, to do them 
justice, require from women of inferior social position 
a higher moral standard than that which they them- 
selves acknowledged, and they had, in general, a 
keen appreciation for talent. 

The seething resentment engendered by so 
anomalous a condition of things was brought to a 
culminating point on the appearance of Rousseau's 
diatribe against the theatre, which was the signal for 
a vehement warfare on paper. Amongst those who, 
besides d'Alembert, appeared as advocates for the 
defence, were many members of the anathematised 
profession, and chief of them Mademoiselle Clairon, 
the celebrated tragic actress, then at the height of 
her reputation. Though by no means so attractive 
a personality as poor Adrienne Lecouvreur, Clairon 
was by nature a reformer — a circumstance which, 
perhaps, accounts for the strong sympathy existing 
between her and the Encyclopedists — the party of 
reform. She imagined the bold design of delivering 
herself and her colleagues from the stigma of excom- 



152 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

munication, believing that, if the Church could be 
induced to lighten her hand, the State would soon 
follow suit. 

Her first attempt was an unfortunate one. Dis- 
trusting her own unaided powers, she confided the 
task of preparing her grand petition and remonstrance 
to a lawyer, one M. Huerne de la Mothe. This 
gentleman accordingly drew up a statement of the 
case, Stage versus Church, which showed much learn- 
ing, but proved so obnoxious to the susceptibilities of 
those in authority that it was ordered to be burnt by 
the common hangman. Undeterred by this rebuff, 
Clairon pursued her agitation, incidentally involving 
herself in a somewhat unseemly squabble with the 
Gentlemen of the Household, by whom she was 
summarily sent to prison for insubordination. A 
tremendous sensation ensued, and Clairon, on her 
release, determined, with the warm approval of 
Voltaire and the other Encyclopedists, to abandon 
her profession unless something were done to remedy 
the intolerable grievances attaching to it. 

She and her party now resorted to the expedient 
of petitioning Louis XV. to place the Comedie 
Fran9aise on the same footing as the Opera, which, 
by a curious contradiction, was subject to no anath- 
ema, civil or religious. A memorial, this time most 
carefully drawn with much help from Voltaire, 
was presented in 1766 for that purpose to the King, 
but he refused to entertain any such project, and the 
whole scheme fell through. Clairon, true to her 
threat, left the Comedie Fran9aise, and appeared 
henceforth only at quasi-private performances in 
the houses of the great. The first use she made of 
her liberty was to effect, somewhat ostentatiously, that 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 153 

reconciliation with the Church which, on her own 
showing, she had always most ardently though vainly 
desired. 

The pose maintained throughout by Clairon, of a 
pious Christian unjustly excluded from the consolations 
of religion, may well excite a smile if considered in 
conjunction with her manner of life, which was at no time 
remarkable either for sobriety, righteousness, or godli- 
ness. Yet, though quite as singular a reformer as her 
enemy, Jean- Jacques himself, we cannot deny her the 
possession of a reforming instinct almost as powerful 
in its way as his own. She failed, indeed, in effecting 
the reform which she had most at heart (and which 
delayed its coming in full for nearly a century longer), 
but her influence on the traditions of the national 
drama was equally beneficent and enduring. Like 
most French actors in those days she was born to 
a humble and not over - reputable station in life. 
Destined by a poor but far from honest mother to 
the profession of seamstress, she showed from the 
first an unconquerable aversion to the drudgery of 
the needle. The true dramatic vocation was entwined 
with every fibre of her being, and before she had ever 
seen a theatre she learned the first lessons in stage- 
craft by watching from her bedroom window the 
private rehearsals of an actress over the way. Her 
mother forbade her to think of the stage, by no means 
on account of the moral risks thereby involved, which 
would probably have been much the same had the 
girl continued nominally to sew for her living, but 
out of awe for the mysterious penalties of excom- 
munication. Ultimately, however, Clairon, then aged 
thirteen, carried the day, and after some years of 
provincial experience made her first appearance, in 



154 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

1743, at the Comedie Frangaise, in the character of 
Phedre. The public was speedily convinced of her 
genius, and a few more years made her the acknow- 
ledged queen of the Parisian stage. It was then that 
she executed the project suggested to her by the 
dramatist Marmontel, in whose plays she had 
"created" several principal rdles, and with whom 
her relations had been for a time more than friendly, 
of using her influence to emancipate the national 
theatre from the bondage of sundry bad old tradi- 
tions hitherto unquestioned. 

It had been till then considered a fundamental 
principle of histrionics that acting should not, save 
in comedy, be modelled upon Nature. For tragedy 
there was a regulated code of declamation and gesture, 
and any departure from it was supposed to be 
derogatory to the dignity of the cothurnus. To this 
curious convention was added an entire absence of 
the slightest attempt at fitness in costume. The 
players, both men and women, were dressed, gener- 
ally with great magnificence, in the height of con- 
temporary fashion. When we remember that another 
Procrustean law restricted the range of tragedy to 
far-past (preferably classical) epochs, we can imagine 
the effect produced by ancient Greeks and Romans 
masquerading in powder and patches, hoops and 
trains, ruffles and high heels, Court coats and knee- 
breeches. 

It may truly be said of Clairon that she changed 
all this. She had the courage to break through the 
vicious convention of sing-song declamation and stilted 
gesture and to make her acting an intenser form of 
real life, rather than something in its essence apart from 
reality. Her first essay on these new lines was made 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 155 

during a provincial tour, and met with such success that 
she was encouraged to continue the same method 
on her return to Paris. Next she took in hand the 
reformation of theatrical costume, beginning with the 
part of Electra in the two tragedies of that name (by 
Voltaire and Crebillon respectively). The unfortunate 
Achaian princess had hitherto been represented by 
ladies stylishly attired in pink satin relieved by black 
jet motifs. Clairon did not yet venture to go the 
length of anything so inelegant as a Greek chiton, but 
she compromised matters by wearing a plain black 
trailing gown, an unfashionable, and indeed untidy, 
coiffure, and no perceptible rouge nor powder. Above 
all, she laid aside her crinoline. The magnitude of 
this last innovation can only be fully evident to those 
who realise the prominent part usurped by this article 
of dress in the social life of the eighteenth century, 
when ball invitations bore requests to ladies to come 
sans panier, and when the highest virtue which long- 
suffering masculinity could discern in a woman was 
that the circumference of her skirt should want a yard 
of the fashionable width. Thanks to Mademoiselle 
Clairon, the panier henceforth disappeared, at least 
from historical tragedy. Her example was all-powerful 
with the "profession," and the 20th of August 1754 
marks an important epoch in the annals of the 
Com^die FranQaise. On that day (about four months 
after the arrival of Julie de Lespinasse in Paris) 
Voltaire's tragedy. The Orphan of China, was re- 
presented for the first time, and the newspapers 
record as an unprecedented circumstance that all the 
actresses in this performance appeared sans panier. 
Not only so, but some sort of attempt was made at 
least to suggest the Chinese costume by a compromise 



156 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

which would doubtless appear laughable enough to us 
now, but was certainly a step in the right direction. 
The reform thus inaugurated was extended by the 
energetic Clairon throughout the whole theatrical 
repertoire. On one occasion she carried her devotion 
to realism so far as to dress the part of a heroine 
suddenly aroused from sleep in a simple robe-de-nuit, 
thereby (who would have thought it ?) greatly scandal- 
ising the decorous instincts of her audience. Courage 
indeed, and not only courage but disinterestedness, 
was required for her work of innovation, for the whole 
of her rich stage wardrobe — which represented, she 
said, a cost of over ^1200, and might under the old 
conditions have served to the end of her career — was 
henceforth of no use to her. 

Her example was all powerful with regard to 
naturalness in acting no less than in dress, and for the 
amelioration which she effected in both these direc- 
tions she received the warmest encomiums from the 
whole philosophic party. Marmontel singled her out 
for special panegyric in his Encyclopedia article on 
" Declamation." D'Alembert wrote that Mademoiselle 
Clairon's talents were above his praise ; that she was 
true to Nature alike in her acting and her costume, 
and that her example had rendered great services to 
the Theatre Fran^ais, and even to the Opera. But 
Diderot, not perhaps from entirely disinterested 
motives, was the most enthusiastic of all. The fact 
was that he had his own pet project in the matter of 
theatrical reform, involving no less an achievement 
than the introduction of a species of drama new to 
the French stage, and he naturally considered the 
co-operation of this influential actress a supremely 
desirable thing. 




MADEMOISELLE CLAIRON 

FROM AN ENGRAVING BY COCHIN IN THE 
BIBLIOTH&QUE NATIONALS 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 157 

The traditions of the national theatre had hitherto 
drawn a sharp dividing line between the respective 
spheres of tragedy and comedy, the one being, on the 
whole, restricted to great historical or mythological 
themes, and the other to the domestic or more humble 
side of existence. Diderot proposed to alter all this 
by introducing a kind of serious drama, not properly 
either tragic or comic, which should be written in 
prose instead of stately Alexandrines, and deal with 
the facts and emotions of everyday contemporary life. 
In furtherance of this excellent design, he produced 
two plays {The Natural Son, 1757, and The Father 
of the Family, 1758), neither of which obtained for 
some time the honour of representation, but which, 
notwithstanding, aroused a considerable ferment in 
the literary world. To modern taste these pioneer 
productions seem insipid and incoherent enough ; 
but in their own day they gained the approval of so 
competent a critic as Lessing, and they certainly mark 
an era in the development of French drama. Like 
most innovations favoured by the Encyclopedists (who 
were understood to stand together in all such enter- 
prises), the " new drama " met with a storm of opposi- 
tion from the conservative party. 

An unlucky chance embittered the controversy still 
further, by introducing what is euphemistically termed 
"the personal note." The Princesse de Robecq, 
daughter of the Mar^chal de Luxembourg by his 
first marriage, a lady who contrived to combine a 
consuming zeal for religion with a way of life by 
no means religious, and had taken part prominently 
against the Encyclopedists, considered herself affronted 
by a reference in one of Diderot's many "introduc- 
tions." (In the matter of lengthy prefaces to his 



158 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

plays he was quite as unmerciful as Mr Bernard 
Shaw.) Nobody now seems able to identify the 
passage in question, and Diderot himself strenuously 
denied that he had ever had any offensive intention, 
but the Princess, whose morbid resentment was 
doubtless aggravated by ill-health, continued to 
brood over her wrong, and to seek some means of 
revenge. She found an instrument ready to her hand 
in one Charles Palissot, an indifferent critic and 
more than indifferent playwright, who, at her instiga- 
tion, composed The Comedy of the Philosophers, a 
miserable parody of the Femmes Savantes, in 
which Diderot and his most prominent associates 
were, under the thin disguise of pseudonyms, held 
up to ridicule as the most odious and contemptible of 
men. The satire of Moliere's delightful comedy was 
probably quite as unjust and ill-directed as that of 
Palissot's imitation, but the one is a work of genius, 
the other devoid of even the most superficial clever- 
ness. Such as it was, however, it found favour with 
Madame de Robecq, who exerted all her influence to 
have it produced at the Comedie Fran^aise. 

Her interest at Court was sufficient to remove any 
obstacles in that direction, and the actors (to whose 
collective judgment a new play was then submitted 
for approval, instead of to a comitd de lecture as now) 
declared themselves, with one exception, in favour of 
an author so excellently patronised. Clairon alone, 
faithful to her friends the Encyclopedists, raised her 
voice against Palissot and all his works, but she 
was overborne, and the first representation of Les 
Philosophes took place on 2nd May 1760. The 
Princesse de Robecq was then within two months 
of her death from lung-disease, but, sustained by the 



OUTLAWS BY PROFESSION 159 

feverish energy peculiar to consumptive patients, she 
appeared on this first night in the house, leaning 
on the arm of Palissot, who was honoured with a 
seat in her box. Her deathlike appearance made 
a strong and painful impression on the audience, and 
before the end of the First Act she turned faint, and 
was obliged to go out. 

A few days later there appeared an anonymous 
pamphlet, entitled "The Vision of Charles Palissot," 
which had been surreptitiously printed at Lyon, 
and was hawked about Paris by colporteurs. It 
was an extremely able satire, written by the Abbe 
Morellet (the author of several theological articles in 
the Encyclopedia), and it dealt with Palissot accord- 
ing to his deserts, and with his patroness in a manner 
which would seem inexcusably harsh but for Morellet's 
after assurance that when he wrote it he had no idea 
she was really dying. In the "Vision," Palissot 
(represented as a kind of Holy Willie) is supposed 
to review the past events of his (far from reputable) 
life, and to foresee with triumphant exultation the 
pleasant results which were to ensue for him on 
his devoting himself to the defence of religion. 
The Princess is introduced in these terms : 

"And we shall see a great lady, sick to death, but 
desiring for all consolation that she may live long 
enough to be present at the first performance and say, 
' Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, 
for mine eyes have seen revenge' And this great 
lady shall found by her will a pious bequest, for ever 
to buy up all the pit tickets whenever the comedy is 
acted, and they shall be given away for the love of 
God, to people who will undertake to applaud." 

To outward appearance, the dying woman received 



i6o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

this taunt in that spirit of insolently courageous im- 
perturbability which all her class held it a duty to 
cultivate. She wrote a note in the third person to 
Clairon, whose antipathy to Palissot was well known, 
saying that she was "most anxious" to see the 
"vision," and had heard that Mademoiselle Clairon 
had some copies for sale, and would perhaps oblige 
her. The great actress replied with dignity that she 
felt convinced an insinuation so insulting to her could 
never have proceeded from the Princess herself, and 
that the note containing it, which she returned, was no 
doubt the work of a forger. But meanwhile Palissot 
had succeeded in procuring a specimen, and sent it to 
Madame de Robecq, endorsed, " with the author's 
compliments." 

This treacherous stratagem had, as was intended, 
the effect of increasing her resentment against " an 
enemy apparently so insulting, and almost the last use 
she made of her brief remaining span was to engage 
the minister Choiseul, formerly her lover, to wreak 
vengeance on the anonymous libeller. Through pres- 
sure put on one of the colporteurs, Morellet's name 
was discovered, and he was sent to expiate his error 
in the Bastille, but released at the end of a few weeks, 
on the intercession of the dead woman's stepmother, 
Madame de Luxembourg, who was induced by his 
friends Rousseau and d'Alembert to take pity on him. 
So ended this miserable quarrel which, curiously 
enough, was destined to exercise an influence on the 
fortunes of Julie de Lespinasse and of the man who 
silently adored her. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 

THE comedy of The Philosophers had aroused 
in d'Alembert a strong, and to a large extent a 
personal, feeling of resentment. It is true that Palissot, 
as in his private duty bound, had singled out Diderot 
for especial and practically undisguised vituperation. 
But there is little doubt that d'Alembert was also, 
though less openly, assailed under the title of Valere, 
a villainous adventurer who, by paying assiduous court 
to a rich and foolish widow, the object in private of 
his mockery, induces her to promise him the hand of 
her daughter and heiress, while shamelessly avowing 
to his friends that he has no love for the girl, who 
on her side is strongly averse to him. This was one 
of those libels, at once feeble and remote from truth, 
which theoretically have no power to hurt, and in prac- 
tice are intensely resented. The whole contemporary 
world was agreed that good sense and sound judg- 
ment were as much the distinguishing qualities of 
Madame Geoffrin (the lady indicated) as disinterested- 
ness and independence of d'Alembert. It was true 
that she had an only daughter who did not share her 
mother's predilection for the Encyclopedists, and had 
perhaps an especial objection to d'Alembert, but she 
had been married some twenty-seven years earlier to 
a nobleman quite unconnected with the philosophic 
party. Yet the fact remains that d'Alembert was 
deeply wounded by this miserable caricature and 
L i6i 



1 62 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

displayed his indignation in a far from philosophical 
fashion. 

" I have not been to see it [the play], and do not 
mean to go," he writes to Voltaire ; and finding his 
correspondent inclined to blame Morellet for having 
"insulted a dying woman," he replies, with a touch 
of ferocity : "It's all very well to be a dying woman, 
but one need not be a viper for all that. You cannot 
have heard of the shameless way in which Madame 
de Robecq intrigued to force on the acting of Palissot's 
play . . . and that she had herself carried to the 
theatre on the first night, dying though she is. . . . 
I cannot see that a person so spiteful and vindictive 
as that deserves any pity at all. . . . Besides," he 
adds, more moderately, "the 'Vision' only said that 
she was very ill, and that is surely no crime." 

It must be owned that there is something "not 
altogether quite nice " about such language when 
applied to a woman on the verge of death. In ex- 
tenuation it may be urged that d'Alembert, as one 
of the Encyclopedist leaders, had suffered much from 
the enmity of Madame de Robecq. The same excuse 
unluckily cannot be alleged for the very similar stream 
of vituperation which he poured forth upon one 
who had proved herself a kind and serviceable friend 
to him, no other, in fact, than Madame du Deffand 
herself. He was firmly convinced that, in the con- 
troversy with which all Paris was ringing, she stood 
on the side of Palissot against himself and his party. 
In this he was mistaken, for in fact she satirised both 
sides with much impartiality. The Encyclopedists, 
excepting Voltaire and d'Alembert himself, displeased 
her fastidious taste by their deficiency in bon ton, and 
the devout faction were equally obnoxious to her from 



THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 163 

their want of humour. D'Alembert, however, on 
slender evidence, concluded otherwise, and in a letter 
to Voltaire mentioned her as one of the avowed pa- 
tronesses of Palissot's comedy, adding the graceful 
implication that in her quality of superannuated demi- 
mondaine she would naturally have much in common 
with a modern representative of the same profession 
such as Madame de Robecq. Reflections of this 
kind (expressed in language much too vigorous to 
be literally reproduced) are characteristic of d'Alem- 
bert, and, though almost a relief amid the boundless 
toleration of that period, they certainly show that he 
was not exempt from the failings commonly supposed 
to accompany superior virtue. Madame du Deffand, 
however, aided in a measure by the interposition of 
Voltaire, succeeded in clearing herself of the charge 
brought against her, and the quarrel was, after a 
fashion, made up, but on the man's side the fire still 
continued to smoulder, and four years later it blazed 
out once more, and this time only to be quenched by 
death. 

It is evident indeed that his ill-feeling against 
Madame du Deffand was of older standing than 
the business of The Philosophers, since otherwise so 
serious a breach would scarcely, on so slight a pretext, 
have been made in a friendship which had lasted 
for seventeen years. By one who had no liking 
for d'Alembert (the daughter of Madame Geoffrin, 
above mentioned) the beginning of this change is 
assigned to a certain disastrous day when he accident- 
ally overheard the blind woman retailing with much 
enjoyment to a circle of common friends some sar- 
castic remarks concerning himself contained in a letter 
from Voltaire. There is no antecedent improbability 



1 64 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in any portion of this story. D'Alembert, as we 
have already seen, could be vindictive enough, and, 
though Madame du Deffand was really in her way 
attached to him, she never hesitated between her 
friend and her joke. But the original source of 
bitterness lay deeper than any such surface disturb- 
ances, and proceeded from a cause more honourable 
to the philosopher. The man who can see the woman 
whom he loves unhappy and not forget both reason 
and friendship in espousing her cause against the 
person to whom he attributes her unhappiness is 
scarcely worth calling a man. And it was an influ- 
ence precisely of this kind which severed d'Alembert 
from Madame du Deffand. 

The relations between Julie de Lespinasse and her 
patroness had for some years continued to be entirely 
creditable to both. The girl had certainly some hard- 
ships to endure, but the congenial and appreciative 
atmosphere in which she found herself made them 
at first seem light in comparison with the miserable 
experiences at Champrond. " I hate myself," she 
wrote in after life, "for not being able to put up 
with mediocrity. I am very hard to please ! But is 
it my fault ? Just consider what my education has 
been ! Madame du Deffand (for whatever else she 
wants she has brains enough), the president Hen- 
ault, the abbe Bon, the archbishops^ of Toulouse 
and Aix, M. Turgot, M. d'Alembert, the abbe de 
Boismont, M. de Mora ; these are the people who 
taught me to speak and think, and were good 
enough to consider me worth the trouble." On her 
side, she spared no trouble to please these people who 
received her so kindly, and above all the benefactress 

1 Lom^nie de Brienne and Boisgelin de Cice. 



THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 165 

who had brought her into their midst. We have seen 
how she won approbation from the most fastidious 
of Madame du Deffand's friends. She was no less 
successful in conciliating the servants of the house, 
an achievement involving greater difficulties. Her 
friendly relations with the excellent Devreux have 
already been noticed. They dated from Madame 
du Deffand's visit to Champrond in 1752, and were 
much approved by her, though she did not fail to rally 
her young protegee on being rather too polite to the 
lady's maid in bestowing on her the title of " Made- 
moiselle." Four or five years after Julie's installation 
at St Joseph, it is to her that Mademoiselle Devreux 
turns for help in a moment of great distress. A 
relation of hers has incurred the displeasure of his 
master, a powerful farmer-general, and has been 
subjected in consequence to a rigorous and illegal 
imprisonment. Two of his friends have in their 
possession certain documents exculpating the prisoner 
from all blame, and these it is their intention to lay 
before the unjust farmer-general ; but in order to 
obtain a hearing it is necessary, or at least desirable, 
that they should be countenanced by a person of 
superior rank. In much perplexity of mind Devreux 
appeals to Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The time is 
then between eight and nine on a February morning. 
Julie (poor girl) is in bed, but she instantly rises and 
accompanies the two men in Madame du Deffand's 
carriage, lent for the occasion. The examination of 
the papers proves a lengthy affair, and, feeling her 
presence to be a useful check on the proceedings, she 
remains in attendance till six that evening. For an 
unmarried woman of twenty-five thus, in behalf of 
a social inferior, voluntarily to subject herself to 



i66 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

fatigue, publicity, and possible insolence, was a rare 
thing in that day and country, and we herein recog- 
nise the germ of those qualities which were afterwards 
matured by the influence of Turgot. 

Julie showed equal tact and good feeling in dealing 
with Madame du Deffand's family as with her servants. 
Strongly as Gaspard de Vichy had resented his sister's 
protection of his daughter, he had far too keen an eye 
for future contingencies to make a lasting quarrel of it, 
and, the mischief being once accomplished past recall, 
he magnanimously determined to forgive and forget. 
Accordingly, in the spring of 1755, or less than a year 
after Julie had come to live with Madame du Deffand, 
we find Gaspard's eldest son, Abel, in Paris, and on the 
best possible terms with his aunt and her companion. 
The boy, who, though under fifteen, had been already 
for some time in the army, had come, on the way to 
Champrond, to spend a part of his leave in the capital, 
where he had apparently a very pleasant holiday, and 
was, in fact, quite worn out with party and theatre 
going. He was delighted to meet once more with his 
beloved teacher and playfellow, whose real relation- 
ship with himself he did not learn for several years 
after, when it was revealed to him by his mother. 
His father, for reasons easily conjectured, was most 
anxious that he should make a good Impression upon 
Madame du Deffand, and was perpetually writing him 
instructions to this end — instructions which, on a boy 
of his frank and honest nature, had probably an effect 
the reverse of that intended. Whether for this reason, 
or from mere youthful gaucherie, he seems more than 
once to have gone near to offending his formidable 
aunt, but he had a powerful advocate in Julie, who 
threw all her influence into the scale in his favour. 



THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 167 

All through her life she had a deep and sisterly attach- 
ment for Abel, Nothing" can be more charming^ than 
the tone of affectionate banter in which she writes to 
him about this time. 

" Good-bye, my dear, for Monsieur seems to me too 
cold. I know, of course, that you are quite grown up 
now, and a very important person, but remember that 
I have known you since you were ' no higher than 
that.' You called me your dear love then, and I still 
deserve the name, so please don't let us be ceremoni- 
ous with one another. I don't want you to call me 
Mademoiselle in your letters. Before people we must 
conform to custom, but in private I had rather not be 
kept at a distance." 

With far more tact than Gaspard, she bases her 
exhortations to the boy concerning the duty of 
making himself agreeable to his aunt entirely on 
the higher ground of Madame du Deffand's funda- 
mental affection for him, as demonstrated by her 
kindness in many instances. It is deeply touching 
also to observe how she craves for reconciliation with 
the relatives who had treated her so unkindly. 

" I am overjoyed to hear from you that your mother 
is still so kind as to have a friendly remembrance of 
me. Please assure her of my gratitude. I hope that 
M. de Vichy's cold will have no serious results. It 
has been the universal malady here, and we have 
not had the right sort of weather for getting rid of it." 

Perhaps there is a certain amount of intention in 
the succeeding passage. 

" It is not the sort for going to the country either, 
but, all the same, we are going on Saturday to 



1 68 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Montmorenci to stay till Easter. It is a big business 
for your aunt to make a move like that, but she has 
been so pressed that she could not refuse. Besides 
she will be just as comfortable there as at home. 
M. and Madame la Marechale de Luxembourg 
are extremely attentive, and we shall have all the 
people there whom we see most of here, M. le 
President, Mesdames de Mirepoix and de Boufflers, 
M. de Pont-de-Veyle," etc. 

The de Vichys knew enough of fashionable Paris 
to be aware that an invitation to Montmorenci was 
esteemed a high honour, and she was naturally not 
unwilling to let them know that it had been conferred 
upon her. Five years later we have another letter to 
Abel dated curiously enough from Montmorenci, and 
equally characteristic of an affectionate elder sister. 
The young man is again at home, this time on sick 
leave, and her tone is at once sympathetic and en- 
couraging. In addition to his other troubles, he has 
had a quarrel with Madame du Deffand, but Julie has 
succeeded in setting things right, and in the spirit of a 
true peacemaker disclaims all credit for the achieve- 
ment. 

" I have nothing whatever to boast of in regard 
to your reconciliation with Madame du Deffand. It 
was a case of pushing an open door. She was very 
kindly disposed towards you all the time, and not at 
all angry with you. She takes great interest in all 
your concerns, and speaks her mind frankly to you, 
because she thinks you worth the trouble. So, my 
dear, don't be remorseful or uneasy, you are not only 
forgiven, but beloved." 



THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 169 

In this letter she sends affectionate remembrances 
to both Abel's parents, from which fact we infer that 
she is now on friendly terms with Gaspard, as well as 
with his wife. There are also kind messages to the 
servants at Champrond, and a good-natured mention 
of Abel's younger brother,^ who had now, in his turn, 
begun soldiering, and was not precisely winning golden 
opinions in his new calling. Her obvious desire to 
make the best of this far from lovable scapegrace, as 
of all the de Vichy family, shows how far she was re- 
moved from any wish to supplant them in the favour of 
Madame du Deffand. Her anxiety to prevent family 
dissensions did not stop here. When Abel, with 
boyish inconsequence, writes, on his arrival at home, 
to her instead of to his uncle, the Abb^ de Cham- 
prond, who had been apparently his host at Paris, she 
carefully conceals this preference from the good priest, 
while gently rebuking the offender. "You ought to 
write to him, he will be gratified by the attention, and he 
deserves it." No one certainly was ever more exempt 
than she from the detestable spirit of mischief-making. 

To Madame du Deffand, on her side, we must also 
allow the honour which is her due. We have seen 
that she displayed no resentment, but rather satisfac- 
tion, at the favour won by Julie from some of her 
oldest friends, both male and female. When a 
younger admirer appeared on the scene her behaviour 
appears to have been on the whole not unworthy 
of a responsible and conscientious guardian ; though 
it is certainly from this incident, which took place 
when they had lived together for three or four years, 
that we must date the first perceptible straining of 
the relation between the aunt and niece. The hero 

^ The sister seems to have died some years earlier. 



lyo A STAR OF THE SALONS 

of this story was descended from a noble and ancient 
Irish family, which still exists at the present day, its 
head, Viscount Taaffe, being settled in Austria. Mr 
Taaffe (his Christian name is unknown, and it is not 
clear whether he was entitled to the prefix of Honour- 
able) was in the habit of paying long visits to Paris, 
where he had numerous influential connections, at 
Court and elsewhere. Like many other distinguished 
foreigners, he obtained an introduction to Madame du 
Deffand, and became, for a time, a regular attendant 
at her salon. His appearance marks a momentous 
epoch in the experience of Julie de Lespinasse. 
Setting aside d'Alembert, of whose silent devotion 
she was perhaps scarcely conscious, her admirers 
hitherto had been all elderly men, such as H^nault, 
the Chevalier d' Ay die, and the Marquis d'Uss^, and 
it had never occurred to her to take any of them 
seriously. The feeling with which she inspired the 
newcomer was of a warmer kind, and was by her fully 
reciprocated, and Madame du Deffand suddenly awoke 
to the fact that a flourishing romance was in progress 
beneath her roof. 

She strongly objected — why, in the absence of 
fuller information, we are unable to say. As M. de 
S^gur implies, it is not impossible that Taaffe had 
already a wife in Ireland, though at the same time it 
is scarcely likely, in the light of Julie's subsequent 
behaviour towards Guibert, that she would knowingly 
have encouraged the attentions of a married man. 
But, even setting aside this unpleasant possibility, one 
must take into account that the gallant Irishman's 
fortune probably consisted mainly of debts, and 
further, that the men of his nation, though far more 
attentive to unmarried women than Frenchmen, are 



THE ROOT OF BITTERNESS 171 

scarcely more in the habit of marrying for love than 
they are. Considering Julie's almost penniless condi- 
tion, it was altogether unlikely that the affair could 
result in matrimony, and Madame du Deffand, with 
her hard-won experience of the seamy side of life, is 
not to be blamed for desiring, in her niece's interest, 
to put an end to it. 

Of the two persons mainly concerned, the gentleman 
received her remonstrances with a docility which 
proves that he was in his heart convinced of their 
reasonableness. The Misses Berry, Horace Walpole's 
friends, had seen letters written by Taaffe to Madame 
du Deffand testifying alike to his affection for Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse, and his gratitude for Madame 
du Deffand's prudence and tenderness in regard to 
her, and proving, in their opinion, that her behaviour 
to her prot^g^e had been, in this instance, at least, 
entirely maternal. But such was not the view taken 
by Julie de Lespinasse herself. Instead of promising 
compliance with the grave admonitions of herpatroness, 
she broke out into protest with a vehemence which 
dismayed the elder woman, by whom the potentialities 
of passion hidden beneath a surface of consummate 
tact and self-control had been perhaps hitherto un- 
suspected. Finding argument and reason unavailing, 
Madame du Deffand had recourse to authority, and 
summarily forbade the girl to see or speak to Taaffe 
again, enjoining her to remain henceforth in her room 
whenever this gentleman came to call at St Joseph. 
In after years Madame du Deffand told a strange 
story of the effects which followed upon this rigorous 
restriction. According to her, Julie, driven to despair 
by the thought of never again meeting her lover (who 
probably left Paris about this time), took a dose of 



172 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

opium, which nearly proved fatal, and had a lasting 
influence upon her health. 

We are not obliged to accept without reservation 
this statement, made after the final rupture between 
the two women. There is no doubt that Julie de 
Lespinasse did, at a later and much graver crisis of 
her existence, make an attempt at suicide, which was 
only frustrated by the intervention of Guibert. There 
is therefore nothing impossible in the narrative of 
Madame du Deffand, but we must also remember that 
the girl had early contracted the pernicious habit of 
having resource to opium as a remedy for neuralgia 
and sleeplessness, and M. de S^gur may be right 
in his conjecture that in her extreme agitation she 
accidentally took an overdose of the narcotic. In 
either case, Madame du Deffand seems to have shown 
much alarm, and a degree of compunction which 
proves that she felt herself guilty of some excessive 
harshness in the matter. According to La Harpe, she 
melted into tears at the girl's bedside, and though it 
may be true that Julie, "with the Roman," only said : 
" Too late, madame," a reconciliation did evidently 
ensue. Taaffe had, by this time, doubtless returned 
to Ireland, and, the grand stumbling-block being thus 
removed, all, to outward appearance, went smoothly 
for some time longer between the aunt and niece. 
But their first love for one another was never really 
restored, and with every year the estrangement grew, 
till the last remnant of affection had fallen away from 
both, and left them declared and irreconcilable 
enemies. 



CHAPTER XIV 

" LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN " 

FROM Julie's letter to Abel de Vichy, above cited, 
we have seen that, so late as 1760, she had 
still sufficient influence with Madame du Deffand to 
act successfully as mediatrix between the aunt and 
nephew. Even in the following year, some letters 
written to Madame du Deffand herself, while that lady 
was absent at Montmorenci — the companion being 
for the moment too unwell to accompany her — show 
that, so far as outward seeming went, they continued 
to be on affectionate terms. In fact, it must be owned 
that the tone of exaggerated devotion adopted by 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse leaves a slightly un- 
pleasant impression on the mind. Intense and 
ardent as she undoubtedly was, she could scarcely 
have meant what she said when comparing the pain 
of separation from her patroness to the agony of 
death {}) — and I fear the expression only proves that 
she had learnt accurately to estimate the real value of 
Madame du Deffand's much-vaunted love for sincerity 
and plain speaking. In fact, the reflection which na- 
turally suggests itself is that she must have decidedly 
enjoyed this interval of freedom. In these days 
of perpetual holidays for all classes of society, it is 
difficult to realise how rare was any respite in such 
lives as hers, for Madame du Deffand scarcely ever 
left home except to visit Montmorenci, whither, as 
173 



174 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

we have seen, Julie generally attended her. Accord- 
ingly, we find that, in spite of her indisposition, she 
seems to be having what in modern phrase is styled 
a good time. Her first letter is dated Friday evening, 
and that day she has spent resting in her room, and 
means, if not better to-morrow, to remain in bed. But 
when the morrow comes she goes out to dinner (or, 
as we should say, to luncheon), then takes a turn in 
the Tuileries gardens with another lady, and in the 
evening makes one of a supper-party given by the 
Comtesse de Boufflers, where, as she says, she did not 
eat much, but met several agreeable people and had 
a very pleasant evening. On the Monday, apparently, 
she follows Madame du Deffand to Montmorenci. 

Plainly the companion had now a recognised 
position of her own, and that among the very pick of 
Parisian society. Not only so, but she enjoyed an 
amount of liberty which was unusual in that age and 
country for an unmarried woman still under thirty, 
and decisively proves that, despite the Taaffe episode, 
Madame du Deffand knew she could be trusted not 
to impair her employer's laboriously acquired respect- 
ability by anything approaching to a scandal in the 
household. When the Marquise had first taken Julie 
under her protection she had intended, whenever she 
herself should be absent from Paris, to place the girl 
as a pensionnaire in the interior of the convent, where 
such frivolities as going out to supper would have 
been impossible, but we see that she did not think it 
necessary to adhere to this precaution. 

Despite the almost adulatory tone of these letters, 
we can discern in them some traces of the growing 
coldness not with Julie herself but with d'Alembert. 
Apparently she had been entrusted with an invitation 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN 175 

to him to accompany her on the Monday to Mont- 
morenci, and Madame du Deffand seems to have 
been especially anxious that he should accept it. 

" Don't be afraid, madame, I will not forget what 
you told me about Monday," writes Julie, "and I will 
do my best to bring M, d'Alembert along with 
me. I expect to see him this evening at Madame de 
Boufflers'." 

On returning from the party aforesaid that night, 
or rather at one on the following morning, she has to 
tell a tale of failure. M. d'Alembert cannot come, 
because he is about to be carried off by main force on 
a visit to another aristocratic mansion ! 

" He has made me promise to tell you that he is 
very sorry, for he had been looking forward to 
Montmorenci, and would have liked to pay his 
respects to M. le Mar^chal and Madame, and he 
feels it a privation to be so long without seeing 
you. 

One would be interested to know the precise terms 
in which d'Alembert expressed the refusal thus ren- 
dered by his tactful friend. Did he say that when he 
wanted an invitation to Montmorenci he could sret 
one without Madame du Deffand's patronage, and 
much preferred to go there when she was absent ? 
Quite possibly, for two years later we find that 
his animosity has reached a stage at which he will 
scarcely give himself the trouble of concealing it. He 
is now (1763) in Prussia, as the guest of Frederic the 
Great, and save for the dietetic difficulties already 
referred to, seems to be enjoying himself very much. 
His letters read like one continued eulogium on the 



176 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

great King and all his works, including even the royal 
performance on the flute. His enthusiasm may be 
partly accounted for by the consideration that Prussian 
postal arrangements were, rightly or wrongly, supposed 
to include a governmental inspection of outgoing letters 
from distinguished foreign residents, yet in the main 
it was probably genuine. Frederic, as we learn from 
Voltaire's experience, could make himself very agree- 
able for a short time, and his heart was still set upon 
winning the great scientist to take up his abode at 
Berlin. D'Alembert, however, could not be persuaded 
to forsake his native country for "a thousand reasons, 
one of which you will never be clever enough to 
guess." I need scarcely say that the yoti in question 
is Julie de Lespinasse, and the phrase just quoted 
seems to convey the nearest approach which his 
philosophic doubt had in a nine years' acquaintance 
permitted him to make to a declaration of love. His 
stay in Prussia lasted three months, from June to 
September, and during those three months Julie 
received from him twenty-three letters, sometimes of 
considerable length, giving full details of all the 
writer's experiences, including his own jokes, and the 
King's appreciative reception of them. To Madame 
du Deffand, the correspondent whom, in former days, 
he had delighted to honour, d'Alembert during the 
same period only wrote once, and that time in a tone 
of cold and stiff politeness. The King, he observes, 
has asked for her and spoken admiringly of her talent 
for epigram. He confides to Julie that what Frederic 
really said was : "Is Madame du Deffand still alive .'* " 
"You may be sure," adds d'Alembert, with a sneer, 
"that I will let her know of this agreeable remark. I 
am going to write to her by this post, if I can." 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN 177 

When at last he finds time some days later to write 
the single letter which we have mentioned, he begs 
that she will not give herself the trouble of answering 
in person. Perhaps Mademoiselle de Lespinasse will 
be so kind as to let him know (once in a way) how 
all is going on at St Joseph. Plainly the Marquise 
knew nothing of the correspondence between her 
companion and her former protege. Certainly, she 
would have been offended beyond recall had she 
known that d'Alembert, while thus on the score of 
his many occupations neglecting herself, had sufficient 
leisure to write by every post to another. As it was, 
she disregarded his injunctions, and replied in her own 
difficult writing, thanking him warmly for his " charm- 
ing letter," and alluding in really affecting terms to 
"the golden age" of their friendship "twenty years 
ago." Evidently, the blind woman was fully conscious 
that this friend of twenty years standing no longer 
felt towards her as in the past. Evidently, also, she 
regretted the estrangement, and would fain have re- 
moved it. But d'Alembert returned no answer to this 
letter. Her moving appeal, " Let us be friends again, 
as we once were," fell on deaf ears, and we may well 
believe that this was the last attempt at a reconcilia- 
tion which Madame du Deffand's pride would permit 
her to make. 

Half-a-year after d'Alembert's return from Prussia 
ensued the final irrevocable rupture, caused, like the 
smouldering hostility which preceded it, by indignation 
at the treatment awarded to Julie de Lespinasse. 
We should certainly be mistaken, however, if we were 
to trace the first beginning of this feeling to the source 
from which, with the girl herself, it probably originated 
— the abortive "affaire Taaffe." It is very unlikely 

M 



178 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

that d'Alembert who had more than the average 
obtuseness of his sex in such matters, ever even noticed 
the tenderness between Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
and the Irishman, and had he understood the state of 
affairs he would probably for once have thought that 
Madame du Deffand was entirely in the right. What 
he could not fail to see was that, as the years went by, 
Julie, however she might strive to save the appear- 
ances, and perhaps the realities, of the old tenderness, 
was no longer happy with her employer. That lady, 
though she could not precisely be described as 
capricious, was more than ordinarily exacting in the 
demands she made on others, and every instance of 
failure to comply with those demands tended to pro- 
duce on her part a rankling and accumulated resent- 
ment against the offender. " God does not require 
so much as she," wrote Julie de Lespinasse, in the 
bitterness of her soul. " With her a single venial sin 
cancels in one moment the services of many years." 
The girl, as we have seen, erred, if anything, on the 
side of over-suppleness, but she was no more a lamb 
nor a dove than she was a fool, and must often have 
failed to satisfy the exactions of her patroness, who 
mentally set down each item of wrongdoing to swell 
the black account opened perhaps at the date of their 
first quarrel over the captivating Mr Taaffe. 

Things were made much worse than they would 
otherwise have been by the obvious partisanship of 
d'Alembert. Though he had never been more than 
a friend, Madame du Deffand was exceedingly jealous 
of his preference, and for her niece to have supplanted 
her in that quarter was an unpardonable sin. It was 
gall and wormwood to her to witness the affectionately 
confidential terms on which the two now stood to eachj 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN 179 

other, and she made her resentment so plainly felt 
that they were driven, in self-defence, to devise some 
means of meeting without her supervision. It is thus 
that we must account for, and if possible excuse, the 
curiously childish and not over-honourable proceeding 
which led to the final separation between Julie and 
her aunt. 

D'Alembert found sympathy and support in two or 
three other habituds of the salon, who, while regarding 
Julie with feelings less warm than his, were on terms 
of intimacy with her, and, like him, suffered from the 
difficulty of enjoying unrestrictedly the charm of her 
conversation, for it is manifest that the pleasure once 
displayed by Madame du Deffand at every mark of 
appreciation bestowed on her niece had by degrees 
given place to a watchful and irritable jealousy of one 
who now appeared to her in the light of a successful 
rival. Madame du Deffand was, as we know, never 
visible till six p.m. During the winter which fol- 
lowed d'Alembert's return from Prussia, he and the 
sympathisers above referred to — namely, Marmontel, 
Turgot, and the Chevalier de Chastellux (the last 
a gentlemanly dabbler in literature) formed the habit 
of arriving at St Joseph an hour before the daily 
reception began, and spending the intervening time 
in a call upon Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 

No suspicion of impropriety attached to these re- 
unions, which seem never to have been of a tHe-a- 
tete description. The tiny bedroom in which they were 
held would certainly not at first sight strike an English 
reader as exactly the place where a lady should receive 
her friends of the opposite sex. But this objection 
would scarcely occur to French people at the present 
day, and would have been quite incomprehensible to 



i8o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

them then. The difference, in this respect, of national 
custom is noted by Young, who observes, with some 
exaggeration : " We are so unaccustomed to Hve in 
our bed-chambers that it is at first awkward to find 
in France that people live nowhere else." The real 
wrongdoing lay in the fact that the existence of this 
miniature sa/on was kept a secret from Madame du 
Deffand, in the full understanding that she would 
never, had she known, have permitted it. It is, in- 
deed, difficult to understand how such a trick could 
have been successfully played upon a woman whose 
perceptions, naturally sharp, had derived additional 
keenness from her loss of sight ; but late-rising on the 
part of the mistress of a household is proverbially the 
opportunity of her subordinates, and Julie's bedroom, 
which looked on the courtyard, was on the floor above 
that of her patroness, and doubtless out of earshot. 

But it was inevitable that the day of reckoning, 
however deferred, should come at last, and one even- 
ing, about the middle of April, 1 764, it came in good 
earnest. It is said that the evil secret was revealed 
to Madame du Deffand by a servant — through mere 
blundering, we must believe, for, if the whole household 
had not been more or less on the side of Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse, it is manifest that the deception could 
not have lasted a single day. Perhaps, as Marmontel 
implies, the blind woman's suspicions were aroused by 
observing that not only her companion but the gentle- 
men above enumerated, betrayed into forgetfulness 
by the charm of those familiar reunions, had fallen 
into a habit of joining the circle downstairs at a later 
and later hour. In any case it is certain that on the 
April evening in question she rose from her bed an 
hour earlier than was her wont, mounted the unac- 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN i8i 

customed stairs, and stood, terrible in her wrath, on 
the threshold of the room which still echoed with lively 
words and pleasant laughter. 

The scene which followed has been reconstructed 
in the well-known novel " Lady Rose's Daughter," 
with much alteration, indeed, in the circumstances, 
but still with a vigour and picturesqueness of detail 
which the mere chronicler of cold facts cannot hope to 
emulate. The gentlemen doubtless felt the necessity 
of withdrawing at once from the fray. Even d'Alem- 
bert would realise that the lady of his heart must, on 
this occasion, be left to fight her own battle unaided 
— as indeed she was entirely competent to do. Only 
stray fragments of the ensuing dialogue between the 
two women have come down to us, but they are 
abundantly sufficient to show that Julie de Lespinasse 
had not the worst of the encounter. 

'* So, mademoiselle, you would rob me of my friends !" 
cried Madame du Deffand, her nasal voice rising al- 
most to a scream. "It is by such treason that you 
show your gratitude ! You shall remain no longer 
under my roof. I have had enough of nursing a viper 
in my bosom ! " 

With equal passion the younger woman, her habi- 
tual self-control thrown all to the winds, fiercely re- 
torted. 

"Gratitude! I have long known that you detested 
me. You never miss an opportunity of wounding and 
mortifying me. I would not stay here longer if you 
asked me. I have friends of my own, real friends, 
who will treat me very differently from you ! " 

And so forthwith, that very night perhaps, the aunt 
and niece parted to meet no more. We do not know 
where Julie first took refuge on leaving St Joseph. 



1 82 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

For a woman in her position there were only two alter- 
natives consistent with decorum : a convent or the house 
of a friend. Most likely she chose the last, for many 
houses would be open to her at such a crisis. Madame 
de Luxembourg, or Madame de Boufflers, or the 
Duchesse de Chatillon, afterwards known as her most 
devoted friend, may quite well have been her hostess 
during the days immediately following the rupture 
with Madame du Deffand. 

It seems, however, that so far this rupture was not 
irrevocable. Madame du Deffand had not apparently 
said : " Go, and see my face no more," but : " Do not 
come into my presence till six months [or some such 
period] have expired." Within three weeks of her 
departure, Julie, who, as her conduct towards the de 
Vichys has already shown, was by no means of a vin- 
dictive nature, had begun to feel qualms of repentance, 
and, though far from regretting the life at St Joseph, 
yearned for a reconciliation with her kinswoman and 
former benefactress. Her conscience reproached her 
with her own share in the quarrel. (It is astonishing 
how reproachful conscience can be on such occasions, 
when we are no longer subjected to daily association 
with the opposite party in the strife.) And it certainly 
cannot be maintained that Julie was free from blarhe 
in the matter ; yet no woman who knows how often 
deceitfulness is, by the tyranny of parents and other 
protectors, absolutely forced upon girls in what is 
called a "sheltered" position, as the only possible 
price of peace, will feel inclined to throw the first 
stone. 

She wrote an affectionate letter begging that she 
might be allowed to see Madame du Deffand before 
the prescribed term had expired. But that lady 




LA DUCHESSE DE CHATILLON 

FROM A PAINTING BY ROSALBA CARKI^RA (?) IN THE LOUVRE 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN 183 

had not, on her side, found reflection conducive to 
repentance. On the contrary, her wrath had been 
increased by brooding over the wrong she had suffered. 
That anyone beside herself might have suffered wrong 
was not a consideration which at any time entered 
into her theory of the universe. Something, more- 
over, had occurred in the interval which tended still 
further to embitter her. On the morrow of the parting 
from Julie she had sent for d'Alembert, and made 
known her view of the situation in some such words 
as these: "You cannot be both her friend and 
mine. Choose then between us." And d'Alembert 
had in effect replied : " My choice was made long 
ago, madame. I have the honour to wish you a good 
day." It is incomprehensible how so clever a woman 
should in the circumstances have expected, as it is 
plain she did, any other reply, and mortification at 
her own blunder doubtless contributed to the rage 
induced by this repulse. Her answer to Julie was 
well calculated to crush out every lingering emotion 
of tenderness or regret, and to make a reconciliation 
henceforth impossible. 

" I cannot consent to receive you so soon, made- 
moiselle ; the conversation which I have had with you, 
and which has caused our separation, is still too fresh 
in my mind. I cannot believe that it is from any 
feeling of affection you wish to see me. It is im- 
possible to love anyone by whom ' we know that we 
are detested, abhorred, etc.,' 'by whom we are per- 
petually humiliated, mortified, etc' These are your 
own words, and the ideas which have been long sug- 
gested to you by those whom you call 'your true 
friends.' They may really be such, and I wish with 



1 84 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

all my heart that they may obtain for you all the 
advantages which you expect from them, happiness, 
fortune, position, etc. What use could you make of 
me now, and of what service could I be to you ? My 
presence could not give you pleasure, it could only 
serve to remind you of the early days of our acquain- 
tance, and the years that followed them, and the only 
thing to be done now is to forget all that. Yet if, 
hereafter, you came to remember those days with 
pleasure, and the recollection gave rise to some 
remorse, some regret, I do not make it my boast to 
be inexorable, I am not unfeeling, I can distinguish 
truth from falsehood. A sincere repentance could 
move me, and restore the liking and tenderness which 
I once had for you. But meanwhile, mademoiselle, 
let us remain as we are, and content yourself with my 
good wishes for your happiness." 

To farewells and good wishes thus expressed only 
one response was possible. Henceforth Madame du 
Deffand became, on the testimony of d'Alembert, the 
one person in the world whom Julie de Lespinasse 
might perhaps be said to hate. Julie de Lespinasse, 
on the other hand, was by no means the only person 
whom Madame du Deffand hated, but certainly there 
was no one whom she hated so much. She made no 
secret of her feelings on this point, and not only 
expressed them^ in words of almost inconceivable 
coarseness and brutality, but carried them into 
practice by doing all in her power (happily it was very 
little) to injure the fortunes of her former friend. 

1 E.g. — Her blasphemous and scarcely translatable remark on hear- 
ing of Julie's death, " If she is in Heaven, the Holy Virgin had better 
look out for herself. She is quite clever enough to supplant her in the 
affections of God the Father." 



LIKE WATER SPRINKLED ON THE PLAIN 185 

More dignified and self-respecting was the conduct 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, who, so far as out- 
ward appearance went, gave on her part no sign of 
hostility, and in public never mentioned Madame 
du Deffand, save in terms of distant respect. Her 
sole revenge, a revenge enjoyed by herself alone, or 
at most by one or two especial friends, and never 
made known to its unconscious object, was to com- 
mit to writing, in the form of one of the fashionable 
"portraits," her real opinion of Madame du Deffand's 
character, grounded on ten years of intimate experi- 
ence. This remarkable document, which has only of 
late years been discovered, is too long to be quoted 
in its entirety, but a few extracts will serve to show 
— first, how well Mademoiselle de Lespinasse could 
write, and secondly how the iron must have entered 
into her soul, to produce such concentrated bitterness 
of feeling. 

" Her servants are the only persons towards whom 
Madame du Deffand shows any sense of justice. 
Them she does not treat altogether badly. She has 
another good quality closely allied with this one. She 
is liberal and generous, although economical, or rather 
because economical, for without good management 
there can be no true generosity. But it seems as if, 
in her, a good quality could not proceed from a good 
principle, and her generosity is not the evidence of a 
really noble mind. On the contrary, she is naturally 
base and sordid. She is only generous in so far as 
she is dependent on those around her. She tries to 
make friends of them merely because she cannot 
convert them into slaves, for she has often been 
heard to regret the abolition of slavery. . . . To 



1 86 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

people of whom nothing is to be made, she is all 
hardness, without either humanity, charity or compas- 
sion. She does not so much as know what these 
virtues mean, and always sneers at them in others. 
Consistent, even to her own disadvantage, in her 
hatred of equality, she is always on her marrow-bones 
before so-called great people, especially if they are 
influential at Court, and often she degrades herself 
to no purpose whatever. She is quite astonished 
to find that scarcely anyone likes or trusts her, for 
she wildly imagines that she deserves to have friends, 
although possessing every quality which can tend to 
alienate them. Inconsiderate, tactless, selfish, jealous 
— there you have her character in four words. . . . 
When she has a contempt for people she takes 
little trouble to conceal it She will shrug her 
shoulders when answering them. Under the impres- 
sion that they cannot hear her, she will audibly 
discuss, with the person next her, all the points in 
their appearance or manner of which she is pleased 
to disapprove. And after all this she is amazed to 
find that the whole world is not at her feet, humbly 
awaiting her orders. She imagines that her want of 
consideration for others is a proof of sincerity, for 
sincerity is another virtue on which she prides herself. 
But she only displays it to those from whose resent- 
ment she has nothing to fear. True courageous 
sincerity is a virtue unknown to her, and when she 
sees it in others, she calls it impertinence." 

Truly there is naught so bitter as love turned 
to hate. 



CHAPTER XV 

A NEW DEPARTURE 

WE have now reached a crisis in our heroine's 
career at which it is plainly required by all the 
canons of fiction that a suitor for her hand should pre- 
sent himself. As this is not a novel, but a record of 
hard facts, I am compelled to admit that nothing of 
the kind occurred. We might certainly have thought 
that now or never was the opportunity of d'Alembert, 
and it does in effect appear that some such impression 
was current about this time in his own circle. Eventu- 
ally the rumour reached Voltaire in his retreat at 
Ferney. *' Is it true," he asks in one of his letters 
to Damilaville, " that Protagoras [his nickname for 
d'Alembert] is going to be married to Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse ? " But his curiosity is speedily set at rest 
by a letter from the person chiefly concerned, who 
with much irritability flatly denies the soft impeach- 
ments " Good Lord," is his comment, " what should 
/do with a wife and children ? " He is much too poor 
to think of such a thing, and if he had a little money, 
his choice would be a solitary life in the country. 
(This last statement I entirely disbelieve. He could 
never have existed out of Paris.) The lady with 
whose name his own has been unwarrantably coupled 
is indeed deserving of all possible respect, and might 
well make any husband happy, but she is worthy of a 
more eligible alliance than he can offer, and there is 
nothing between them but, etc. etc. etc. 
187 



1 88 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

This categorical statement seems to have convinced 
Voltaire, who wrote to Damilaville : " Protagoras is 
not married. It would be well if he were, that he 
might have sons like himself, and it is well if he is 
not, seeing that his fortune is not in accordance with 
his merits." 

Was poverty really the obstacle which stood be- 
tween d'Alembert and his beloved.-* His income had, 
of late years, materially increased. The French 
Government, in tardy recognition of his scientific 
achievements, had bestowed on him a pension of fifty 
pounds. The payments^ for attendance at the meet- 
ings of his two Academies (Acad^mie Fran^aise, and 
Acad^mie des Sciences) brought in another fifty pounds, 
more or less. But he had certainly other sources, or 
at least expectations, of revenue, probably in connec- 
tion with his literary undertakings, for at the time of 
his death, in 1783, his income amounted to something 
like 1000 pounds, a very respectable sum for those days. 
Julie, on her side, was by no means penniless. Be- 
sides the annuities already mentioned, she had re- 
ceived two more; one, in 1758, of about twenty-five 
pounds, the other, in October 1763, amounting to nearly 
ninety pounds ; both, it is supposed, being bestowed by 
Government, through the intervention of the minister, 
Choiseul, whose friendship with Madame du Deffand 
is well known. The truth appears to be either that 
the philosopher had an excessive terror of the re- 
sponsibilities of married life, or that, in his heart of 
hearts, he feared a refusal, divining, as he can scarcely 

1 The meetings of the Academie Frangaise were held three times a 
week. Each member present received a crown (six francs), besides his 
share of the portion of those who absented themselves. The prudent 
Madame Geoffrin used to scold her proteg^, Marmontel, for staying away 
from meetings and thus losing money. 



A NEW DEPARTURE 189 

have failed to do, that the lady's feelings towards him, 
however friendly, were not the same as his feelings 
towards her. 

The problem of Julie's future was not then to be 
solved by marriage. Far more original was the 
career on which, with the aid of her numerous ad- 
mirers, she now embarked. Madame du Deffand 
must indeed have gnashed her teeth over the too 
literal fulfilment of her good wishes concerning those 
"real friends" of whom Julie expected so much — es- 
pecially as the friends aforesaid comprised nearly the 
whole of her own circle. Even such close allies as 
Renault and Madame de Luxembourg took sides with 
her new-made enemy, all, without exception, being of 
opinion that the girl had been unfairly treated. 
Madame du Deffand sullenly endured this divided 
allegiance, and did not again resort to the extremity 
which had succeeded so badly in the case of d'Alem- 
bert. She seems, however, to have flashed into anger 
against her nephew, Abel de Vichy, who had em- 
braced the cause of his former instructress with all 
the enthusiasm of an affectionate and honest-natured 
boy. She went, indeed, so far as to complain to the 
young man's father, but Gaspard, to do him justice, 
appears on this occasion to have sided, more or less, 
with his daughter. 

The scheme devised by her friends for Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse was briefly this : that she should take a 
set of rooms and there establish a salon for herself. 
It is not easy for us to realise the extraordinary 
originality of this project. The mere circumstance 
of living alone in lodgings was for a single woman 
of good reputation almost undreamed of. The 
ordinary course would have been to board in a 



I90 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

convent (which with Julie's present income she could 
have comfortably done), and from time to time to 
vary the monotony by paying visits to friends out- 
side. This, for example, was the way of life adopted 
by Mademoiselle d'Ette, the false friend of Madame 
d'Epinay. For a single woman (always excepting 
actresses and ladies of the Ninon de Lenclos order) 
to become in her own person the centre of a distin- 
guished social circle was a more extraordinary 
phenomenon still. Even in England or America 
at the present day, it would scarcely be possible 
without a considerable fortune. But Julie de Les- 
pinasse was actually to be subsidised for the purposes 
of salon keeping, much as the editor of a literary 
paper, run at a loss, might be subsidised by a 
millionaire in our own time. Nothing shows more 
plainly the importance formerly attached to the now 
neglected art of conversation. In " Lady Rose's 
Daughter," it will be remembered that the heroine 
in like circumstances took, as a matter of course, to 
journalism, in which her influential friends procured 
her all kinds of introductions. Nobody ever thought 
of suggesting authorship to Mademoiselle de Les- 
pinasse, well as we have seen that she could write. 
It was felt that she could serve her generation, and 
maintain her own social standing, far better by 
talking. 

The lodgings were duly taken, the furniture being 
provided by Madame de Luxembourg. Renault, 
Turgot, d'Uss^, and Madame de Chatillon subscribed 
a sum sufficient to cover the initial expenses of the new 
establishment, for it appears that Julie had no ready 
money in hand. The latest addition to her income 
(between eighty and ninety pounds) had only, it will 



A NEW DEPARTURE 191 

be remembered, been guaranteed to her in October of 
the previous year, and though on the strength of it 
she had probably expended the whole of the sixty 
or seventy pounds which she already possessed, divi- 
dends of all kinds were then so habitually in arrear 
that it is quite possible she had not yet received the 
first instalment. 

But a more effectual helper than any of those above 
enumerated now appeared on the scene, in the person 
of Madame Geoffrin. That most generous and kindly 
of women had never yet encountered Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse in the flesh, for as the mistress of 
a salon, in its way quite as distinguished as that of 
St Joseph, she was regarded by Madame du Deffand 
in the light of an enemy. She had, however, a long- 
standing friendship with d'Alembert, whose mother 
(in the circumstances a curious coincidence) had first 
initiated her into the charms of literary society. 
Knowing her almost boundless liberality and her 
passion for surrounding herself with interesting 
people, d'Alembert sought to enlist her sympathies 
on behalf of Julie, and with entire success. Some 
human satisfaction at the thought of disobliging 
her rival, Madame du Deffand, may in the first 
instance have qualified the kindly impulse which 
induced her to hold out a helping hand, but as 
soon as she had made the acquaintance of her new 
protegee all inferior considerations were merged in 
a strong and lasting affection which might justly be 
styled maternal. 

As was usual in her case, her feelings presently 
found an extremely substantial form of expression. 
In October of that same year (1764) she laid out 
20,000 francs on the purchase (at ten per cent.) of 



192 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

a life annuity for Julie de Lespinasse, thus increasing 
her income by 2000 francs (equal to £^'j of the 
contemporary English currency). Not only so, but 
she paid her in addition a yearly pension of 3000 
francs (rather over ^^130), observing on the subject 
of this last benefaction a silence so inviolable that 
its existence was never suspected by the outer world 
till both women had passed away. To obtain the 
funds necessary for this princely munificence, Madame 
Geoffrin sacrificed three of her most valuable pic- 
tures. 

Taken altogether, our heroine's income would thus 
amount to about 8500 francs (or ^370 ^ in English 
money of that day). Her lodgings, which will pres- 
ently be described, were taken on a nine years' lease 
at a rent of 950 francs (about £^i, los.). From 
contemporary documents it would appear that in the 
matter of repairs the landlord's responsibility was 
then, roughly speaking, the same as at present, and 
included certain sanitary precautions, into the details 
of which it is not advisable here to enter, though the 
reflections aroused by them are of a sufficiently appal- 
ing nature. A clause in the lease bound Mademois- 
elle de Lespinasse to pay yearly "42 livres, 10 sols" 
(about £1, 17s.) towards the wages of the portier, 
or in modern terms the concierge, who then, as 
now, was a prominent figure in the life of Parisian 
lodging-houses. By proverbial repute a surly and 
unsympathetic functionary (except when under the 
prospective influence of New Year benefactions), he 
pursued some sedentary trade, such as tailoring or 

^ Afterwards increased by other annuities, of which the sources are 
unknown ; towards the end of her life she seems to have had as much 
as ;^ 500 a year. 




MADAME GEOFFRIN 

FROM THE PORTRAIT BY CHARDIN IN THE MUS^E DE MONTPELLIER 



A NEW DEPARTURE 193 

shoemaking, in the invisible recesses of his lodge, 
responding in silence to the ever-recurring request 
for le cordon. 

Julie's landlord was by trade a "master joiner," and 
her rooms occupied the second and third floors of a 
modest house, no longer existing, at the junction of 
the Rue Bellechasse and the Rue St Dominique, about 
a hundred yards from the abode of her former pro- 
tectress. In Paris most houses, except those of the 
very poor, were then built round a courtyard, and 
accordingly we find that some of the windows of our 
heroine's apartment looked upon "the court," and 
some upon the street, the latter commanding a view 
on one side of the Convent of Bellechasse, which faced 
the beginning of the street called by its name, on the 
other of the magnificent hotel of the de Broglie family, 
situated at the corner opposite to the comparatively 
humble structure occupied by the master joiner's 
tenants. The Faubourg St Germain, to which 
belonged the Rue St Dominique and the Rue Belle- 
chasse, must have been a far pleasanter locality than 
the more crowded quarters in the neighbourhood of 
the Louvre, and it is not strange that Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse should have elected to remain there. 
In this favoured district, then as now beloved by the 
aristocracy, the more important streets, such as the 
Rue St Dominique, were still formed mainly of 
convents and the hotels, or town houses, of great 
nobles. Land was as yet plentiful on this side of the 
river, and the actual country not far off, and hence 
these establishments, both religious and secular, were 
stately buildings, provided with splendid gardens — 
circumstances which ensured good air and quiet 
in at least a comparative degree. The Rue Belle- 



194 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

chasse,^ in which the joiner's house was partly situated, 
was a much smaller and humbler street than the Rue 
St Dominique, from whence it branched off, and con- 
tained a larger proportion of dwellings adapted to 
persons of moderate means ; and hence was naturally 
selected by our heroine.^ 

The rooms occupied by Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
in right of the modest rent above mentioned were ten 
in number, five on each Hage. On the second floor 
was, first, a small anteroom, used in those days as a 
kind of servants' hall, where the male domestic or 
domestics were supposed to wait in readiness for a 
call from the salon. Such being its use, we are glad 
to find that the furniture of the anteroom, besides 
"six chairs stuffed with straw" and "six walnut wood 
arm-chairs," included "a stove of marbled earthen- 
ware." The wicked luxuriousness of modern servants 
in requiring fires for their special behoof is a favourite 
subject for the jeremiads of eighteenth-century lauda- 
tores temporis acH, but evidently Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse was in this matter, as in most others, of 
the new school. From the antechamber opened the 
salon, a room of moderate dimensions, but furnished 
(by the generosity, as we have seen, of the Marechale 
Duchesse de Luxembourg) in the height of con- 
temporary fashion. The walls were covered with a 
wainscoting of white wood relieved by gilding, with 
mirrors inlet. The hangings were of crimson taffetas, 
the arm-chairs and couches (of which we reckon about 
sixteen all told) were also chiefly upholstered in 

1 Julie's letters are directed to the " Rue St Dominique, opposite Belle- 
chasse." But to avoid confusion with her former abode at St Joseph her 
lodgings will hereafter be spoken of as in the Rue Bellechasse. 

^ All these topographical details are taken from the " Histoire G^nerale 
de Paris." 



A NEW DEPARTURE 195 

crimson. There were several engravings from 
pictures then much in vogue, among which we speci- 
ally notice " The Village Bride " and " The Little Girl 
weeping for her Dead Bird," both after Greuze. Over 
the mantelpiece was a clock, apparently of some value. 
A little marble bird upon a pedestal of gilt copper, 
marble busts of d'Alembert and Voltaire, and several 
tables, some of polished wood and some with marble 
tops, are also mentioned. On the same floor was the 
bedroom of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, containing a 
bed "four feet in width," provided with a canopy and 
curtains of crimson damask, two mattresses stuffed 
with wool, a bolster stuffed with feathers, and an 
under-mattress of flock. Adjoining it was a tiny 
dressing-room, but I am obliged to confess that in 
the very complete inventory preserved of the furniture 
of these two apartments, and also of the servants' 
bedrooms, I can find no mention of a washing iup" 
and basin, though both the antechamber and kitchen 
seem to have been equipped with some property of 
the kind. A bath, on the other hand, "of red copper, 
in the shape of a sabot," was kept in a spare room on 
the upper floor, and from many allusions in the letters 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse we know that it was 
frequently, if not daily, in use by her. The fifth room 
on the second floor was a small bedroom for the man- 
servant, almost, save for the bed, unfurnished. On 
the floor above was the more elegant room assigned 
to the femme-de-chambre, boasting a looking-glass 
and a hanging wardrobe. Next to it was the kitchen 
(which as far as I can understand had not a stove 
but an open fireplace), the empty apartment, above 
mentioned, serving as a lumber or box-room, and two 
other rooms, for which at first Mademoiselle de Les- 



196 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

pinasse had apparently no use, and which in the 
sequel she decided to sub-let. 

Besides a charwoman and boy who assisted in the 
heavier work of the establishment, Julie kept three 
servants ; 2. femme-de-chambre {i.e. a lady's maid who 
also discharged some of the duties of a housemaid), 
a footman, and a cook, who did not sleep on the pre- 
mises. In her circumstances to keep a man-servant 
appears to modern ideas an unwarrantable piece of 
extravagance, but we must bear in mind that as 
mistress of a salon she was henceforth supposed to 
be at home to company for four hours every evening, 
and doubtless even during the morning must have 
received numerous visits and messages. The time 
of one servant would be almost entirely taken up in 
answering the door and showing callers in and out, 
to say nothing of errands, and etiquette demanded 
that all these duties should be discharged by a man. 
The cost, besides, was not exorbitant. By the will of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, a legacy of 702 francs 
(or about £2,0) is left to her footman, representing, 
we are told, the expense of his wages, food, and 
clothing for a year. The cook, a member of the 
inferior sex (for though the custom of employing 
male chefs had spread widely during the eighteenth 
century, it was still restricted to persons in fairly easy 
circumstances), is paid at the slightly higher rate of 
two francs a day. It will be observed that out of 
these allowances the servants had to provide their 
own food, the system of board-wages being then very 
usual. 

To the distinguished visitors who every evening 
assembled in the white and crimson salon no refresh- 
ments were offered beyond an occasional bonbon. 



A NEW DEPARTURE 197 

Concerning Julie's own standard of living, we know 
little, but sadly conjecture that, like many solitary 
women in poor health, she was almost culpably 
indifferent on this head. She certainly apologises 
profusely to a male friend for asking him, on one 
extraordinary occasion, to share her meagre dinner. 

" Rates and taxes," in their modern concrete sense 
of a supplement to house-rent, would not figure largely 
in the budget of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. For the 
cleansing and lighting of the streets, operations which 
were both most inadequately performed, all Parisian 
householders were required, once in twenty years, to 
pay down a lump sum, much, we are told, in excess 
of the amount really spent on the work — though this 
latter statement may be partly due to the taxpayer's 
ineradicable habit of grumbling. This imposition, 
however, was clearly the affair, not of the tenant, but of 
the landlord. But our modern ** water-rate " had 
almost certainly its eighteenth-century equivalent in 
the tenant's expenses, though water-supply, as the term 
is now understood, there was none. No bourgeois 
house, says Mercier, in his "Tableau de Paris," is 
sufficiently provided with water. The wealthy, we 
may suppose, took care to have private wells within 
their own precincts. For those of humbler degree 
there was no resource save the public fountains, 
utterly inadequate in number, provided in each 
quarter, and, failing these, the water of the river ! 
Twenty thousand water-carriers, says Mercier, each 
equipped with a couple of pails, were busy all day 
long in carrying Seine water for drinking and house- 
hold purposes, their charge being from three farthings 
to one penny for each load. When we consider that 
the sweepings of the unspeakably filthy streets, though 



198 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

theoretically carted away to waste places outside 
Paris, were through negligence often allowed to make 
their way into the river, we are not surprised to hear 
that strangers, on their first arrival in this metropolis, 
were generally ill from drinking Seine water. What 
we find more difficult of comprehension is that any 
of the habitual residents should have escaped death 
from typhoid. From such appalling reflections one 
turns with relief to the pleasanter task of endeavouring 
to compute the daily expenditure on water-carrying, 
at three-farthings ^ for two pails, in a household like 
that of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. That sabot- 
shaped bath, in which, when feeling out of sorts, she 
often remained for hours, must have accounted for 
many a pennyworth of water, for of course in those 
primitive times the only way to maintain the necessary 
degree of heat would be by constantly renewing the 
supply from that "big cauldron " which figures in the 
inventory of her kitchen furniture. 

In endeavouring to estimate the personal expendi- 
ture of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, we must certainly 
allow a not inconsiderable sum yearly for coach-hire. 
We have seen Arthur Young's statement that walking 
in the streets of Paris was impossible for a well- 
dressed woman, and this is abundantly confirmed by 
other contemporary authorities, though we certainly 
find some exceptions to the rule. The wealthy 
Madame Geoffrin habitually made her shopping ex- 
peditions on foot, and we learn that this was also the 
case with at least one noble lady of the period, who 
seems, however, to have been considered rather ec- 
centric, and on these occasions by no means dressed 

1 The lower rate is selected, as her house was not far from the 
Seine. 



A NEW DEPARTURE 199 

according to her station. Women of the eminently 
respectable, and on occasion faultlessly attired, bour- 
geois class, such as Madame Roland and her mother, 
seldom indulged in the luxury of driving, unless the 
distance were beyond a walk. But considering the 
social circle in which Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
moved, and the style of dress required of her, it 
is scarcely likely that she can often have walked 
farther than, at most, the distance between her new 
home and the Convent of St Joseph, where she 
sometimes visited, not Madame du Deffand, but the 
Duchesse de Chdtillon, who was also a dweller there. 
Yet her letters are a continuous record of theatre- 
going, party-going, and visiting. To take one ex- 
ample only : M. de S^gur tells us that she was in the 
habit of visiting Madame Geoffrin daily, and sometimes 
twice a day. Madame Geoffrin's house was in the Rue 
St Honor^, not far from the present situation of the 
Rue Royale, The distance from the corner of the 
Rue Bellechasse (across the Pont Royal, which stood 
where it now does) is well over a mile. The fare of 
even a humble fiacre would be not less than a shilling 
each way. It is very likely, however, that Madame 
Geoffrin sent her own carriage to take her backwards 
and forwards, a piece of attention frequently shown by 
wealthy Parisians to their poorer friends. Rousseau, 
indeed, with his usual graciousness, complains that 
this arrangement cost him more in tips to the coach- 
man and footman than cab-hire would have done, but 
the kind and thoughtful Madame Geoffrin was just 
the person to guard against such contingencies. Be- 
yond all doubt our heroine, in her social pilgrimages, 
had often the use of a carriage from other friends 
besides Madame Geoffrin, yet, when every possible 



200 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

deduction has been made, there still remains an 
irreducible residuum of expenditure. 

The expenses of dress ^ for a lady who, so to speak, 
was on view every day must also have been far from 
trifling. Guibert, who v^diS par excellence a lady's man, 
and hence no contemptible judge, gives credit to 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse for being in this respect 
an excellent manager. "Her economy," he says, 
"was so skillful as to be imperceptible. She was 
always dressed simply, but with taste. Everything 
she wore was fresh and well-assorted. She gave one 
the impression of a rich person who had voluntarily 
chosen simplicity." Unfortunately, her latest bio- 
grapher, M. de Sdgur, seems inclined to question 
her ability in the management of money, and more 
especially as applied to dress, his strictures being 
mainly based upon the fact that, in the inventory of 
her effects made after her death, we find enumerated 
no less than forty gowns of silk and satin. Yet it is 
possible that M. de Segur (who, though one of the 
first living authorities on this period, is after all a 
man !) may have overlooked one detail known to most 
women — namely, that in those days silk and satin 
gowns practically went on for ever, and hence these 
forty dresses may represent the acquisitions of our 
heroine's twenty-two years residence in Paris : not 
such a high average after all. During those twenty- 
two years (1754-1776) there was (except in hair dress- 
ing) no very drastic change of fashion, for the reign 
of "simplicity" did not set in till about 1780. The 

* Madame Suard naively observes that she was able to save money by 
wearing a nigligd all day at home, and only dressing when she had an 
invitation to supper. Economy of this sort would be quite impossible in 
Julie's position. 



A NEW DEPARTURE 201 

normal mode was still that with which we are familiar 
in the pictures of Watteau and later artists : an upper 
skirt with long train and tight-fitting (very tight- 
fitting) bodice, and an under skirt or "petticoat," 
generally of a different colour, the whole being set 
out with crinoline. Under this system there seems 
no reason why a dress ten, or even twenty, years old 
should not, with a little alteration, have passed muster 
well enouofh. Such variations of fashion as did occur 
seem, moreover, to be reflected in the wardrobe of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse confirming our con- 
jecture that the reason of her having many gowns 
was that she never parted with any.^ Thus we. find 
mention among her garments of the "Polonaise," 
a so-called n^gligd style, which, as we learn on the 
high authority of a pioneer fashion-paper quoted by 
Grimm, but unhappily not otherwise known, was in 
vogue in the year 1768 while the " Caraco," which 
preceded the polonaise, is also duly represented. 

It is to be noted that each gown enumerated in 
the inventory above mentioned consists of a " robe " 
and "jupon" — i.e. the upper and under skirt already 
particularised — yet everyone familiar with eighteenth- 
century pictures must have observed that the upper 
and under skirt are there scarcely ever represented 
as similar. The inference would seem to be that the 
" robe " of one costume was generally worn with the 
"jupon" of another, a method which would produce, 
at a comparatively trifling cost, an almost bewildering 
impression of variety. 

In estimating Julie's character as an economist, 

^ Her dresses overflowed every room in the establishment, even to the 
kitchen. In the matter of underlinen her possessions were on a similar 
scale, and included more than seventy chemises. 



202 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

there is another consideration which must not be 
overlooked. It was then perfectly usual, and in no 
way discreditable, for ladies in poor circumstances 
to receive presents of dress from their richer friends. 
Thus Madame Geoffrin gives a beautiful gown to the 
young Madame Suard ; Madame de Parabere bestows 
a taffetas brocks dress on Mademoiselle Aisse ; Ma- 
dame de Grammont, hearing that Mademoiselle Clairon 
is obliged, under the pretext of mourning, to appear 
always in black, at once supplies the deficiency in 
her wardrobe ; and in all cases the attitude of the 
recipients is that of unqualified pleasure and grati- 
tude. That a woman so popular with her own sex, 
and possessing so many wealthy female friends, as 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, could not have had 
such presents in abundance, if she wished, is scarcely 
probable. It is more likely that while, to quote 
Guibert, "she never asked for gifts of this sort, 
and often refused them," she did accept a certain 
number, enough perhaps to account for an appreciable 
proportion of the "forty silk and satin" toilettes, and 
the numerous grarments of fur which also fiorure in her 
wardrobe. 

On the whole, it seems as if she may, after all, have 
deserved her reputation for good management, a re- 
putation on which she appears, as is only natural, to 
have prided herself more than on her unparalleled 
social achievements. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 

"nPHE new salon thus launched on its career had 
from the first an enormous vogue. Tasting the 
sweets of victory and freedom, Mademoiselle de Les- 
pinasse was probably happier than she had been at 
any former period of her life. But little more than 
a year after she had entered on this stage of her 
career a great trouble fell upon her, in the dangerous 
illness of the most devoted and serviceable of her 
adherents. D'Alembert's health, always frail, had 
for some time been worse than usual. His corre- 
spondence with Voltaire during the summer of 1764 
tells a dire tale of his sufferings from indigestion. 
His friends, he says, persuaded him, much against 
his will, to consult a doctor, who did him more harm 
than good ; a statement which, in view of the medical 
treatment then obtaining, we are cheerfully willing to 
accept. Wisely enough he discontinued the medicines 
prescribed for him, and, less wisely, resorted instead 
to what he called a regimen of his own^ {i.e. to a 
further diminution of his already insufficient allow- 
ance of food), and by this he confidently hoped to 
obtain a complete recovery. 

There were limits, however, even to the virtue of 
starvation, and in July of the following year, 1765, he 
fell ill of internal inflammation, accompanied by fever. 

^ Besides observing a narrow and highly monotonous diet he was a 
total abstainer — a very rare thing in those days, especially in France. 
203 



204 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

For some days his physician feared the worst. " I 
have had one foot in Charon's bark," he wrote himself 
to Voltaire, "and it seemed to me that I was not un- 
willing to enter it altogether." As is often the case, 
however, with delicate people, his grasp on life was 
extraordinarily strong, and in about a week he had 
turned the corner towards recovery. It would be alike 
unnecessary and ungracious to inquire how far this 
happy result was due to the vigorous blistering and 
bleeding of his medical attendant, since that gentleman, 
with a noteworthy exercise of common sense, atoned 
for all his other prescriptions by pronouncing that the 
narrow, crowded, filthy Rue Michel le Comte, and the 
stuffy bedroom over the glazier's shop, were deadly to 
the invalid, and authoritatively ordering him to seek 
a more healthy locality, as soon as he could bear re- 
moval. On hearing this, Watelet, a wealthy friend of 
d'Alembert's, destined hereafter to play a curious part 
in the history of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, at once 
offered the hospitality of his spacious and easily acces- 
sible hotels which was situated near the Boulevard du 
Temple, and hither the convalescent was transported, 
and soon felt all the benefits of better air and compara- 
tive quiet. He was, we are told, in high spirits, and, 
despite his professions to Voltaire, it is plain that life 
seemed to him then worth living. For this he had a 
stronger reason than even the relief from agonising 
pain, or the change to pleasant and congenial sur- 
roundings, for, in the valley of the shadow he had 
found unmistakable proof of the value set on his 
life by the one woman in the world. No fear of 
misrepresentation, no scruple of decorum could hinder 
Julie de Lespinasse from taking up her place at the 
bedside of her suffering friend, whom she nursed with 



THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 205 

all the devotion of an affectionate sister. No one, 
says Marmontel, thought the worse of her for this 
— and it may be true, for the tolerance of those times, 
though extended to many actions by no means deserv- 
ing of it, was sometimes rather fine in its disregard 
for conventionalities as opposed to feelings. 

Full of solicitude for her patient she begged him not 
again to expose himself to the dangers of his insanitary 
lodging in the Rue Michel le Comte, with the additional 
hardship of a long walk every evening in all weathers ; 
for it may easily be believed that he was at least as 
assiduous in his attendance on her salon as he had 
been in his visits to St Joseph, and the distance, as 
we have seen, was much the same in both cases. She 
had two rooms on her upper floor, which were really 
no use to her except to contain lumber, why should he 
not rent them of her? The money would be a help 
to her, and he would be in good air, and able to have 
her company at any moment without fatigue. People 
might talk (this objection would probably come from 
d'Alembert, who, perhaps from his wider experience, 
was far more concerned about the propriety of the 
arrangement than she). Well, let them talk ! Every- 
body whose opinion they cared for would know that it 
was all right. 

D'Alembert was not proof against reasoning so 
strongly supported by his own inclination. He was 
reluctant to leave his kind old nurse, but he did his 
best to make up for the pecuniary loss by a pension of 
twenty-six pounds, and for the "moral damage" by 
visiting her twice a week. In his letter to Voltaire of 
13th August he announces the contemplated change of 
abode in terms which really furnish a first-rate example 
of the suppressio veri, for Julie is not once alluded to 



2o6' A STAR OF THE SALONS 

" Do you know that I am going to be weaned ? At 
forty-seven I cannot be said to be beginning too 
young! I am leaving my nurse, with whom I have 
been for twenty-five years [^i.e. since leaving the 
College des Quatre Nations]. I had nothing to com- 
plain of as far as she was concerned, but I was boxed 
up in a hole where I could not breathe, and I feel that 
I must have air,^ so I am going to move to a lodging 
where it can be had." 

Henceforth the friends lived together, the house 
being shared, as d'Alembert in the supposed interests 
of propriety was careful to explain, by two other 
lodgers. For his two rooms he paid a rent of about 
seventeen pounds, but a large proportion of his time 
was certainly spent downstairs in the apartments of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. M. de Segur is of opinion 
that they even had a common housekeeping fund and 
took their meals together, and it is in any case certain 
that they lived on terms of the most affectionate and 
confidential intimacy, and that when, towards the close 
of her life, Julie had thoughts of changing house, 
d'Alembert was to have accompanied her as a matter 
of course. So close an association between a man of 
forty-seven and a woman of thirty-two would not, of 
course, be possible in our days without considerable 
scandal. That it was possible then, and excited no 
disapproval in such women as Madame Geoffrin and 
Madame Necker, is another proof that the society of 
that period, notwithstanding its shameful habit of call- 
ing evil good and good evil, could sometimes recognise 

^ The fact that d'Alembert, as a baby, in comparison with his condition 
in the purer air of the country, flourished in this unhealthy atmosphere, 
is a terrible proof of the neglect from which he must have suffered before 
the good woman of the Rue Michel le Comte took him in hand. 



THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 207 

real innocence in spite of unfavourable appearances. 
" Nothing could be more innocent than their relations," 
says Marmontel, " and they were respected accordingly. 
Even malice never attacked them, and the high esti- 
mation in which Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was held, 
so far from being diminished, was thereby increased." 
The atrabilious Jean-Jacques in substance confirms 
this statement, though the terms he employs and the 
grounds on which he bases his confidence are widely 
different from those just cited. On the other hand, 
the historian Hume, afterwards a great friend of Julie, 
writes, in a letter dated 22nd September 1 764 : "I went 
to see Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, d'Alembert's mis- 
tress, who is really," he adds, " one of the most sensible 
women of Paris." To English readers, however, this 
phrase (which, moreover^ was written a year before the 
inauguration of the joint establishment) will scarcely 
bear the same meaning as to the French biographers 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, who are, most naturally, 
unaware that in 1764 the word "mistress" was far 
from having entirely lost its ancient and honourable 
signification, and in Hume's mouth probably meant 
"the lady with whom d'Alembert is in love."^ 

That one person, at all events, and that person 
d'Alembert himself, was nervously alive to the possi- 
bility of unfavourable comment, is obvious. We have 
already seen in how irritable a fashion he negatived 
the rumours of his approaching marriage, which in 
the spring of 1766 had elicited a friendly inquiry 

1 It is so used, e.g:, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," where, at a faiiiily 
dinner party, the excellent Moses is bantered on dreaming of his "mis- 
tress" — that is, of the irreproachable Miss Flamborough. Maria in TAe 
School for Scandal is called Joseph Surface's "mistress," because he is 
anxious to marry her. Dr Johnson always spoke of Mrs Thrale as " my 
mistress." 



2o8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

from Voltaire. After the denial quoted in a previous 
chapter he goes on thus : 

" I am living at present in the same house with this 
lady, where there are two other lodgers besides our- 
selves, and that is the cause of this report. I have no 
doubt besides that it has had a helping hand from 
Madame du Deffand, with whom I am told you 
correspond, though why you do, I can't think. She 
knows very well that there is no marriage in the case, 
but she would like to make people think that there 
is something else. A wicked old hag^ like her can 
never believe that any women are virtuous. Happily 
she is well known, and believed no more than she 
deserves," 

Julie, on her side, seems to have been serenely 
happy and free from all misgiving. 

" Torn as a child from her home," says M. de Segur, 
in a passage marked by rare sympathy and insight, 
" hustled about from house to house, always a stranger 
and an alien, she believed that after all her wanderings 
she had reached a peaceful and sheltered haven. No 
less did she enjoy the new sensation of independence, 
the power of satisfying her tastes, and living her life 
as she pleased, with no one to call her to account. 
But most of all, after long and cruel suffsring from 
the coldness or hostility of those with whom her lot 
had been cast, she experienced the deep joy of feeling 
herself enveloped by the warm tenderness of a faith- 
ful affection. . . . This peace, this intoxication of 
liberty, this infinite sweetness of being beloved, caused 

1 "Hag" is only an approximation to the original word, of which a 
more literal version appears unadvisable. 



THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 209 

her at times, as she herself said, to feel ' terrified ' '^ at 
her own happiness." 

It is easy enough to understand why this way of 
life should have seemed more ideally perfect to the 
woman than to the man, Julie, we may surmise, had 
never considered d'Alembert in the light of a possible 
husband, or, properly speaking, of a lover. The men 
who in this sense had power to move her feelings — 
Mora, Guibert, the shadowy Taaffe — were all of a 
very different order from the distinguished mathe- 
matician. The sore and irritable sensitiveness of 
d'Alembert whenever the subject was referred to 
shows plainly, on the other hand, that he had scarcely 
as yet abandoned the dream of entering into a closer 
relation with the mistress of his heart. That, for the 
reasons probably which have been already suggested, 
he did ultimately abandon it, is certain. In the end 
he came to regard the existing order of things as the 
only one possible, and it was not till after the death 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse that he realised, with 
a terrible shock, how far she had been from regarding 
the strange tie between them as binding on her to the 
exclusion of all thoughts of love or marriage. 

Their joint existence was, at the outset, disturbed 
by a trouble which had perhaps the effect of drawing 
them still more closely to one another.^ In the 

1 " You told me ten years ago that you were terrified by the happiness 
which I had brought you," writes the heart-broken d'Alembert, in his 
apostrophe to her after her death, in 1776. 

^ It is with much diffidence that the writer ventures on this point to 
question the high authority of the Marquis de S^gur, who places the 
attack of small-pox before d'Alemberfs bad illness in August 1765. But 
he does not seem to have observed that the (undated) letter in which 
Hume announces " Mademoiselle I'Espinasse is dangerously ill of the 
small-pox. I am glad to find that d'Alembert forgets his philosophy on that 
occasion," also contains an allusion to some dreadful mistake just made 
o 



2IO A STAR OF THE SALONS 

autumn of 1765 Julie fell dangerously ill with small- 
pox, that awful scourge by which, as the Brothers 
Goncourt compute, one Frenchwoman in every four 
was then permanently disfigured. In England, at 
this time, its ravages were on a more moderate scale, 
owing, as was generally believed, to the practice of 
inoculation, imported from Turkey about the begin- 
ning of the century by Lady Mary Wortley Montague. 
Terrible, indeed, as such a prophylactic from our 
modern point of view appears, it is scarcely possible 
for a fair-minded investigator to deny that it did ap- 
preciably diminish both the mortality and the risk 
of disfigurement. In this matter, as in so many 
others, the example of England was longingly re- 
garded by the party of progress across the Channel, i 
In France, inoculation though not wholly unknown, 
was frowned upon by the clerical, the legal, and, to a 
great extent, the medical professions. For a time it 
was even prohibited by law, and at least one notable 
person was imprisoned for advocating it. In 1756 
the Duke of Orleans threw his influence on the side 
of the new doctrine by sending for Tronchin, the 
famous Swiss physician, to inoculate his son — the 

by the physician Gatti, who is in consequence much reviled and driven 
almost to despair (Letter to the Countess de Boufflers, in "Private Corre- 
spondence of David Hume with several distinguished Persons"). This 
mistake is plainly that referred to by Grimm in his letter of 1 5 th September 
1765 (Correspondence, vol. 4) as having just been discovered, Gatti 
had inoculated the Duchesse (not the Countess) de Boufflers two years and 
a half previously, and had guaranteed her as safe from small-pox. Not- 
withstanding this, she had, when Grimm wrote, been attacked by the 
dreaded malady, and Gatti was, in consequence, denounced as a charlatan. 
It is also noticeable that in the letters of d'Alembert and Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse to Hume in the spring and summer of 1766 her illness is 
spoken of as quite recent, which could hardly be the case if it dated back 
a twelvemonth and more (" Letters of Eminent Persons to David Hume." 
Ed. Burton). 



THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 211 

future Egalite — a step which created a tremendous 
sensation, and caused the Duke to be regarded some- 
what in the Hght of a Roman father. A considerable 
impetus was thus given to the movement in favour of 
inoculation, which began to have a certain vogue in 
fashionable circles, but was slow in spreading beyond 
them. It was indeed difficult to find a French doctor^ 
willing or able to undertake the dreaded operation, 
and, according to the Due de Lauzun, the fee exacted 
was twenty or thirty pounds, as against the "twelve- 
pence a head " required, so Horace Walpole tells us, 
for the same purpose in England. 

Yet it is probable that neither danger nor expense 
would have deterred Mademoiselle de Lespinasse from 
this doubtful species of insurance had she not believed 
herself already safe. In early life she had had a 
slight attack of some malady supposed by those in 
charge of her to be genuine small-pox, and in the 
strength of this tradition she had gone on securely 
exposing herself, perhaps, to dangers which she would 
otherwise have avoided, till a rude awakening came 
upon her. For some days she was dangerously ill, 
her sufferings being of course aggravated by the 
treatment then in acceptation. It is true that medical 
science had advanced a little since the seventeenth 
century, when one of the Port Royal chroniclers 
seriously records, as an example of heroic devotion in 
a certain devout lady,^ that she did not entirely desert 
her fever-stricken husband, though "the physicians 
had unanimously forbidden the admission of any air 
to the sick-room." Tronchin, the Genevan doctor 

1 Tronchin and Gatti, the two best-known advocates of the practice, 
were both foreigneis. 
^ The Duchesse de Liancourt. 



212 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

already mentioned, had, much to his honour, de- 
nounced the custom obtaining in royal, and doubt- 
less also in less distinguished, circles of keeping 
bedroom windows hermetically sealed during the 
colder months of the year, and we have seen that 
d'Alembert was ordered to leave his ill-ventilated 
room. We may therefore hope that our afflicted 
heroine's windows were sometimes opened — during 
the day. But the feverish restless nights knew 
certainly no such solace as a breath of pure air. Both 
in France and England, for the sick and the healthy 
alike, to sleep with open windows was regarded as a 
sinful tempting of Providence. Even Arthur Young, 
that hardy votary of the outdoor life, gravely relates 
that he once caught cold by doing so — on a summer 
night too ! Anything of the nature of a cooling drink 
would probably be also denied as deadly poison, and 
bleeding was the recognised method for reducing a 
dangerous temperature. Yet "spite of all that her 
friends could do," Julie de Lespinasse recovered. 

She recovered, but not as she had been before the 
dire disease attacked her. Her eyesight, never strong, 
was seriously affected ; her health much weakened ; 
worst of all, every trace of her former comeliness was 
lost for ever. In the eyes, indeed, of the faithful 
d'Alembert, who had suffered agonies of apprehension 
at the thought of losing her, this last change had no 
existence. " She is a good deal marked by the small- 
pox," he writes to their common friend, Hume, "but 
not the least in the world disfigured " — a judgment 
touchingly characteristic of a sex most unjustly 
charged with inconstancy and an excessive regard to 
external appearances. Which of us has not beheld, 
with emotions half of admiration and half of amuse- 



THE DESTROYER OF BEAUTY 213 

ment, the unalterable and quite unfounded belief of 
many a man in the personal attractions of his wife, 
nay, in rarer instances, even of his sister ? And which 
of us has ever seen a corresponding blindness in the 
most loyal and devoted of women ? 

D'Alembert's opinion was not shared by the world 
in general, nor by Mademoiselle de Lespinasse herself. 
She was fully conscious of her disfigurement, as is shown 
by her infrequent but pathetic allusions to the subject. 
But she bore it with wonderful courage, giving way 
neither to morbid self-consciousness nor to jealousy 
of more fortunate women. She had indeed no reason 
for either emotion, for her social influence was not in 
the slightest degree affected by her loss of good looks. 
We know, from the testimony of Guibert and of others 
who had never known her in her days of comparative 
beauty, that her charm of expression and manner were 
more than sufficient to compensate whatever else was 
wanting. In fact, the most brilliant time of her life 
lay all in front of her, and in the years which followed 
her illness she was to enjoy such popularity and 
admiration as fall to the lot of few women, and to 
receive the passionate devotion of one of the noblest 
men then living. 



CHAPTER XVII 

A woman's kingdom 

nPHE winter of 1755-6 was well advanced before 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse had sufficiently re- 
covered to resume the daily routine which on first 
becoming her own mistress she had inaugurated, and 
which during the remaining ten years of her life knew 
little interruption and, save in unimportant details, no 
change. From one point of view it appears, for a 
woman of her ability, an unsatisfying existence enough, 
but from another full of interest and possibility. 

Her hour of rising was certainly much earlier than 
when she lived with Madame du Deffand, but, in 
view of her weak health and acquired habits, we 
can scarcely suppose that she was, as a rule, what 
her countrymen style Tnatinale. The morning was 
generally given to reading, writing, supervising her 
domestic affairs and conversing with such familiar 
friends as d'Alembert and Condorcet. Dinner, the 
first serious meal of the day (her morning coffee or 
chocolate would be taken in bed), was served to 
d'Alembert at half past-one, punctually, and probably 
Julie, if she had no engagement out of doors, kept 
him company over his frugal dyspeptic's fare. For 
dinner-parties the fashionable hour varied from one 
to four or half-past, the last named being that adopted 
by Madame Necker, and regarded by the older gener- 
ation as a striking proof of modern degeneracy. 
The fashion of literary dinners, which was first 

214 



A WOMAN'S KINGDOM 215 

popularised by Madame Geoffrin, and strenuously 
opposed by her rival, Madame du Deffand, had 
within the last ten years spread widely, especially in 
the Encyclopedic circle, with which Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse may henceforth be considered as identified. 
Best known amongst weekly fixtures of this kind 
were the Mondays and Wednesdays of Madame 
Geoffrin, the Sundays and Thursdays of Holbach, 
the Tuesdays of Helvetius, and the Fridays of 
Madame Necker. We do not hear that Julie was 
in the habit of attending the dinner-parties of Hol- 
bach or Helvetius, or even of Madame Necker, with 
whom she was on friendly terms ; but she was almost 
invariably present at those of Madame Geoffrin, 
being, save the hostess, the only lady admitted to 
them. 

Of the two weekly dinners in the Rue St Honor^, 
one was kept sacred, more or less, to artists, relieved 
by a sprinkling of amateurs. The other was reserved 
for men of letters, and regularly attended by a band 
of professional diners-out, whose names figure promin- 
ently in all the other literary sets of the day : Mar- 
montel, Diderot, Grimm, Morellet, Chastellux, Galiani, 
St Lambert, Thomas, and many more. (D'Alembert 
can scarcely be included in this catalogue, for, though 
faithful to Madame Geoffrin's dinners, he seldom 
accepted invitations elsewhere.) These gentlemen, 
who were all good talkers, formed, as it were, the 
nucleus of the company, but there was also a variable 
element, including from time to time all the most 
interesting and distinguished men to be found in 
Paris, whether natives or foreigners. The discussions 
inaugurated at these reunions often lasted for several 
hours ; the growing preference for dinners rather than 



2i6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

suppers being, in fact, based upon the presumption that 
a larger portion of the day was thus rendered avail- 
able for conversation — a sure testimony, as Taine has 
remarked, to the idleness and frivolity of that period. 
But at Madame Geoffrin's house the canvassers of 
new and audacious opinions were kept within straiter 
bounds than when Holbach or Helvetius played the 
part of host/ The Encylopedists were favoured by 
her as including, on the whole, the best intellect of 
France in that day ; but she had never laid aside her 
respect for order and morality and (less outspokenly) 
for religion, and was wont to cut short any argument 
which seemed to trench on dangerous ground by a 
rough and ready, though good-tempered, exercise of 
authority. This species of matriarchal rigour aroused 
much amusement and little bitterness in her guests ; 
yet it doubtless served to throw still further into 
relief the more conciliatory methods of Julie de Le^- 
pinasse, who, as the only other woman present, and 
almost as the adopted daughter of the house, held a 
position at these gatherings scarcely inferior in im- 
portance to that of Madame Geoffrin herself. 

"Her presence," says Marmontel, "contributed 
inexpressibly to the interest of our dinner-parties. 
Whether she listened or whether she talked (and no 
one could talk better) she was continually the object 
of attention. She was no coquette, but she inspired 
us all with the blameless desire to please her ; no 
prude, but in conversing with her no one could venture 
to pass beyond the bounds of modesty and decorum." 

But dinner, even when consumed in company, must 

^ On which occasions, says Carlyle, with much aptness, there were " two 
main elements . . . in the conversation, blasphemy and bawdry . . .with 
a spicing of noble sentiment." 



A WOMAN'S KINGDOM 217 

have come to an end at last, and then the afternoon 
work began. This, for a woman so thoroughly the 
fashion as Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, included, of 
course, the paying of many formal calls. Custom, 
however, did not demand that the caller should actu- 
ally enter a house save on the "At Home Day" of 
its mistress. In all other cases it sufficed to write 
one's name in the porter's book ^ — the eighteenth- 
century equivalent to leaving cards. There were, 
besides, shows of various kinds to be visited, picture 
galleries, private views, and those dreary exhibitions 
of the semi-scientific order in which Madame de 
Genlis absolutely revelled. When feeling in an un- 
usually adventurous mood, Julie would even take a 
walk, either at the Tuileries or Palais Royal, or per- 
chance go farther afield, to the Invalides or the 
Champs Elysees, both of which promenades then 
bordered closely on the open country. The shops, 
moreover, would surely engage some share of her 
attention, especially that famous establishment in the 
Rue St Honor^ where the latest style of dress and 
coiffure was illustrated by a doll displayed to view 
in the window, and sent in duplicate to England, 
Germany, Italy, Spain, and even to the seraglio of 
the Turkish Sultan ; for Parisian taste already reigned 
supreme throughout the civilised world, and fashion- 
papers had as yet (before 1768) no existence. The 
actual business of shopping, however, was, save by 
persons, like Madame Geoffrin, of unusual activity, 
largely transacted at the house of the purchaser. 

1 The porter's book being a social institution of such importance, it is 
rather curious that the porter at Julie's lodgings should have been unable 
to write. This appears from his inability to sign the receipt for payments 
made him on her death. His wife supplied his place on this and, perhaps, 
on less solemn occasions. 



2i8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Everyone conversant with the literature of that period 
will remember the Parisian shopgirl, with her band- 
box full of chiffons "on appro.," her bright and charm- 
ing manner, her dainty cap and short neat skirt, 
making her morning round among customers not 
exclusively of her own sex. A fascinating figure she 
is, and it is tragic to observe that in public opinion 
her calling was but one step removed (if removed at 
all) from another not generally named. A linen- 
draper's or milliner's shop where the employees were 
of good character was rare indeed in Paris, and the 
owners of such were wont to take a truly national 
pride in the strictness of the surveillance by which 
alone so desirable a result could be obtained. In one 
establishment of this kind, several unhappy girls lost 
their lives in a fire, owing to the excessive solicitude 
of their mistress, who, being obliged to go out, had 
left them locked up as the only means of keeping 
them from mischief. 

By five o'clock, Julie was back in her own rooms, 
and then followed the really important part of the day — 
the four hours during which she received. Only the 
counter-attractions of the Com^die Fran9aise or the 
Opera could prevail on her to abandon this, her essential 
duty to society; and in such cases of desertion, which, 
despite Grimm's sweeping assertion to the contrary, 
occurred with tolerable frequency, the fashionable 
world was duly forewarned of her absence. 

To attempt a detailed enumeration of the guests 
who at one time or other frequented the salon of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is plainly impossible, 
since any such catalogue would include almost all the 
distinguished persons, of every calling and nationality, 
to be found in Paris between the years 1764 and 1776. 



A WOMAN'S KINGDOM 219 

Fine ladies, soldiers, statesmen, divines, scholars, 
littdratetirs — every class was there represented. Here 
Turgot, the ineffectual angel of social reform, dis- 
cussed his philanthropic schemes, and there, a little 
later, Condorcet, " the philosophic marquis," brought 
his ungainly personality and his wildly revolutionary 
ideas. There the Italian ambassador Galiani, "the 
pretty dwarf," gesticulated and held forth at will, now 
relating his long but never tedious stories, now plead- 
ing; in vivacious and not too reverent fashion for the 
existence of a God, and anon, in his moments of re- 
action, sitting sad and silent in a retired corner. There 
David Hume, with his broad kind face and his 
hesitating Scots tongue, sought counsel and sym- 
pathy from "the most sensible woman in Paris." 
There the fascinating Comtesse de Boufflers, tearing 
herself for a while from the semi-royal circle where, 
as mistress of the Prince de Conti, she reigned 
supreme, poured forth her sparkling paradoxes. 
There the warm-hearted Duchesse de Chatillon, who 
worshipped Julie de Lespinasse, hung eagerly on 
every word that fell from the lips of her idol. There 
might be seen that stately Spaniard Aranda, the well- 
known Liberal minister, and there, for a brief space, 
the enigmatic figure of Lord Shelburne. 

The general tone of the company was certainly 
more or less Encyclopedic, but no strict line of de- 
marcation was drawn. All contemporaries are agreed 
that the distinguishing characteristic of this particular 
salon was its catholicity, and that this again was 
entirely due to the unique personality of the hostess, 
which enabled her to attract and combine into a 
homogeneous whole the most diverse and incongruous 
elements. 



220 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

** Except for some friends of d'Alembert," says 
Marmontel, "her circle was formed of persons who 
had no previous connection with each other . . . but 
under her influence they harmonised Hke the cords 
of an instrument played by a master hand. . . . She 
seemed to know what sound each cord would give 
when she touched it ; her insight, that is, into our 
minds and characters was such, that she could draw 
each of us into discourse with a single word. No- 
where was the conversation more animated, more 
brilliant, or better organised. . . . And observe that 
the minds which she thus swayed at her pleasure were 
neither weak nor light. The Condillacs and Turgots 
were of the number ; d'Alembert in her hands was but 
a simple and docile child. No ordinary woman could 
have started discussions among men of this type and 
taken part in them, as she did, with a closeness of 
reasoning equal to theirs, and sometimes with an 
eloquence peculiar to herself. No ordinary woman 
could have varied the conversation at her will, intro- 
ducing each new topic with the ease of a fairy waving 
her magic wand." 

" Politics, religion, philosophy, story-telling, gossip, 
nothing," says Grimm, "was excluded from her dis- 
cussions, and owing to her talents, and without ap- 
parent effort on her part, the most trivial anecdote 
obtained a hearing. The latest intelligence, of every 
sort, was always to be heard in her drawing-room. 
. . . She possessed in the most eminent degree the 
difficult and precious art of drawing out the best 
intelligence of others. . . . She formed a con- 
necting link for minds the most dissimilar, and 
even the most antagonistic. There was no sub- 
ject whatever which she could not discuss, with 



A WOMAN'S KINGDOM 221 

apparent pleasure to herself, and real pleasure to 
others." 

"No one," says La Harpe, "could better do the 
honours of her house. Everyone found his own place 
there, and always to his own satisfaction. She had 
great knowledge of the world, and that most attrac- 
tive kind of politeness which seems to proceed from 
a personal interest in each individual." 

"The general conversation," says Grimm again, 
"never languished. There was no hard and fast rule 
on this point, and you might talk apart to your neigh- 
bour now and then, as opportunity arose. But the 
genius of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse pervaded the 
whole assembly, and the charm of some invisible 
power seemed perpetually to combine all individual 
interests into the common whole which had its centre 
in her." 

It is indeed an alluring picture which these ex- 
tracts present to us, and one which may well provoke 
a sigh over the lost art of general conversation. Our 
modern system is strictly one of duologues, and under 
very favourable conditions — when the right people, 
for example, go down to dinner together — this has 
its own advantages. But there is little satisfaction in 
exchanging a few hurried and futile commonplaces 
with a constant succession of interlocutors, amid a 
deafening babble of conflicting voices ; and such a 
"conversational" programme is, unhappily, but too 
common nowadays. 

General conversation, however, was not always the 
order of the day. The proceedings were sometimes 
varied by another species of amusement equally char- 
acteristic of the eighteenth century, but not equally 
calculated to awaken the regretful enthusiasm of a 



222 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

later generation. This was the terrible institution 
of "readings." It is our wont in these days to be- 
wail the facility wherewith our friends and acquaint- 
ances rush into print, but such jeremiads betray a 
lamentable ingratitude for worse afflictions thus es- 
caped. The claims of friendship can now, in each 
case, be amply satisfied by a statement that we intend 
to buy the special work in question, and to read it 
when sterner occupations shall allow us leisure for 
so pleasing an employment. Sometimes it is even 
sufficient to say that we are trying hard to get it from 
the library, but, owing to the great demand for it, 
have not hitherto succeeded. In the days when 
salons flourished no such cowardly subterfuge was 
possible. The authors took good care of that. The 
correct mode of procedure was for every man or 
woman who had written a play, a poem, a story, or 
an essay, of any sort or size, to volunteer a reading 
thereof at the house of some acquaintance supposed 
to be influential in the literary world. To an offer 
of this kind only one sort of response was admissible : 
a day must be fixed for the lecture, an audience as 
numerous as possible collected, the precious pro- 
duction must be listened to from beginning to end 
with at least an appearance of attention, and, last not 
least, the author must be complimented. If, on the 
strength of the encouragement thus received, he 
afterwards decided to publish, it was the bounden 
duty of his friends to find a sale for his work, each 
undertaking to dispose of a certain number of copies. 
Even Rousseau, who, as the event proved, stood in 
need of no patron, and who, like a well-known 
modern novelist, refused on principle to send in his 
books for review to the literary journals of the day, 



A WOMAN'S KINGDOM 223 

did not disdain to enlist the services of Madame de 
Luxembourg, and other persons of light and leading, 
on behalf of " La Nouvelle Heloise." 

From the worst terrors of this system Julie de 
Lespinasse was comparatively secure, since the re- 
putation of her salon stood so high in literary circles 
that only writers with something to recommend them 
could aspire to the advertisement conferred by appear- 
ing there. Thus, Marmontel gave her the first read- 
ing of a comic opera ; La Harpe of a tragedy, and 
Bernardin de Saint Pierre of his "Voyage a I'lsle de 
France," on which last occasion ^ Julie for once allowed 
her sense of humour to get the better of her habitual 
politeness, thereby earning for herself the author's un- 
dying hatred. The habitues of the Rue Bellechasse 
would never have condescended to such a programme 
as that so amusingly described by Madame Roland 
in her account of a gathering of this kind, where a 
number of obscure ladies and grentlemen recited their 
own verses in turn and then everybody complimented 
everybody else ! It is to be feared, on the other hand, 
that they never listened to any lecture so exhilarating 
as that which once took place at Holbach's Sunday 
circle when Petit, the indomitable Norman vicar, read 
aloud his epic poem, " David and Bathsheba," and 
stoutly maintained, against all criticising, that '' tris- 
tesse'"^ rhymes with '' angoisse," ^ 2ind that there is a 
distinct difference of meaning between ^'occis''^ and 

Julie's salon closed theoretically at nine o'clock, but 

^ Bernardin, it is said, was boasting of the wonderful self-restraint which 
he had exercised in not knocking down an insulting publisher {cf. Dr 
Johnson), Mademoiselle de Lespinasse laughingly exclaimed : "What 
truly Roman virtue." 

2 Sadness. ^ Anguish, * Slain. ^ Killed. 



224 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

unless she herself had, as often happened, an engage- 
ment elsewhere for the rest of the evening, her guests, 
or some of them, would remain as late as ten. It has 
already been observed that no refreshments were pro- 
vided, not even the traditional cup of tea or coffee 
which lends a pleasant stimulus to the humblest social 
entertainments in this country. So Spartan an in- 
difference to the more material aspects of hospitality 
would not greatly astonish us in a French hostess at 
the present time, but in those days of luxurious dinner 
and supper parties it was an exceedingly rare pheno- 
menon, and the fact that it in no way interfered with 
the popularity of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse is one 
more proof of her transcendent social charm. 

At nine o'clock, Julie, as has been said, often, like 
most of her guests, went out to finish the evening else- 
where. Holding so prominent a position in society 
she was sure to be overwhelmed with invitations to 
supper and to the various evening entertainments in 
vogue — teas a PAnglaise, cafds (in private houses), 
charade parties, and so on — and it was probably sel- 
dom before the small hours of the morning that she 
returned home to bed, but unfortunately not always 
to sleep, after the arduous exertions of the day. 




a h 



o w 3 



CHAPTER XVIII 

FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 

BENEATH the brilliant stream of social activities 
described in the last chapter there flowed an 
undercurrent of quiet domestic life, shared only with a 
few chosen friends, and in this more intimate phase of 
Julie's existence we see the best side of her character, 
and also of the society in which she lived. She was 
popular, as has been said, with her own sex, yet, if we 
except Madame Geoffrin, for whom she had an almost 
filial affection, and Madame de Chatillon, whose ex- 
uberant devotion at first rather bored her, but in the 
end touched her heart, we find that her closest friend- 
ships (I do not now speak of any warmer feeling) 
were all with men. The peculiar sweetness of such 
intimacies, more intellectual than is usual between 
woman and woman, more tender than is possible be- 
tween man and man, was well understood at that day, 
Amongst the unmarried, at least, they are now scarcely 
attainable, and when they do occur, the world, with 
no unkind intention, encourages them by giving out 
that the persons concerned are engaged. 

The principal friends of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
were three — Suard, Turgot, and Condorcet. The 
first-named, a man of fascinating personality but not 
wholly dependable character, seems to have been 
much in her confidence, and to have felt towards her 
an admiring and sympathetic affection, without preju- 
dice, however, to his devotion for the charming girl 
p 225 



226 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

whom he had married for love ; while Madame Suard, 
on her part, always entertained a feeling of profound 
gratitude to Julie for the punctuality with which, on 
the stroke of nine, she nightly drove him from her 
door lest the wife at home should feel neglected. 
Turgot, as will appear more at large hereafter, made 
her the confidante of his projects for reform, and on 
some minor points connected with them did not dis- 
dain to follow her advice. Condorcet was the most 
intimate of the three. Unlike Suard, he was, till long 
after Julie's death, a bachelor. Unlike Turgot, he 
was not obliged to spend a large part of the year 
away from Paris. By community of pursuits, more- 
over (they were both mathematicians), he was more 
closely drawn to Julie's housemate, d'Alembert, than 
was the case with either of the two preceding. The 
triangular friendship which united the two distin- 
guished scientists and the fascinating " Muse of the 
Encyclopedia " ^ is presented to us under a peculiarly 
attractive aspect, and gives a pleasing impression of 
the period in which such relations were possible. 

The Marquis de Condorcet was, as his title indicates, 
a nobleman born, but, much to the scandal of his 
illustrious relatives, he had entirely refused to adopt 
the aristocratic profession of arms. Like d'Alembert, 
he had early heard the call of science, and had left all 
to follow it. At the age of twenty-two he achieved 
distinction by an essay on that inviting subject, the 
Integral Calculus, and five years later (in 1770) he 
was elected an associate of the Academy of Sciences. 
Introduced by d'Alembert into the salon of Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse, he soon penetrated into the 
inner circle of her familiars. It was his boast that he 

^ Madame du Deffand's nickname for Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 



FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 227 

shared with d'Alembert the honour of acting as her 
secretary, for Julie's weakened eyes often refused 
service, and these two hard-working men made it 
their pride and pleasure to write letters to her 
dictation. 

A whole train of interesting reflections is suggested 
by this circumstance. Here we have a woman of alto- 
gether unusual intellectual powers, who yet has left be- 
hind her no work of any account save a series of letters, 
which were so far from being intended for the world 
that she herself was most anxious entirely to suppress 
them. She is surrounded by men who all virtually 
acknowledge her as their superior, yet all of these 
men have done work which, td some sort of extent, 
has lived. The literary and journalistic labours of 
Suard, Marmontel, Grimm, Morellet, Diderot are still 
of exceeding utility to all who are interested in a most 
momentous period ; d'Alembert and Condorcet have 
added their quota to the accumulated mass of scientific 
achievement, and while there is any virtue or any 
praise the name of Turgot will be remembered in 
connection with his noble efforts for social reform. 
All these men, while working hard (though not so 
hard as men work nowadays) in their respective lines, 
find time to take part in the social life which entirely 
absorbs the energies of the woman, and in some cases, 
as we have seen, to do a share of her work in addition 
to their own. Is it not possible that we have in this 
situation the true key to the world-wide and age-long 
supremacy of the dominant male ? The masculine 
breadth of view, the masculine sense of humour, the 
masculine command of logic, the masculine absence 
of jealousy are none of them quite so obvious as they 
perhaps should be to the perceptions of an inferior 



228 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

and irreverently critical sex ; but the masculine faculty 
for getting, tant bien que mal, through work is equally 
undeniable and overpowering. 

On the other hand, it must be conceded that in 
Julie's peculiar sphere — the salon — her male friends 
stood, in comparison with her, on the footing merely 
of amateurs. D'Alembert, indeed, seems always to 
have been present at her receptions and to have played 
host to her hostess, but he would himself have been 
the first to admit that his role was entirely subsidiary 
to hers, and that, though he had had a good deal to 
do in the formation of their circle, it was her influence 
which held it together. In literary matters, however, 
he asserted his superiority, as may be gathered from 
his numerous corrections to her infrequent essays in 
this line — corrections which do not always strike us 
as improvements. Chief amongst these opuscula ^ of 
Julie's we may notice two "additional chapters" to 
the "Sentimental Journey" in which Sterne's man- 
nerisms are imitated with really considerable aptness, 
and which, I much fear, were duly read aloud to an 
admiring audience either in Madame Geoffrin's salon 
or in that of the author herself. 

There were ten years between Condorcet and Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse, and twenty-five between him 
and d'Alembert, but the keenness and versatility of 
his mental powers annihilated, so far as the things 
of the intellect were concerned, all distinctions of 
age. In politics and religion his views harmonised, 
of course, with theirs, save that he was in both in- 
clined, as his subsequent career demonstrates, to go 
further than either of his friends. In character he 

1 These are given at the end of her letters to Guibert, edited by 
M. Eugene Asse. 



FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 229 

was, to all appearance, kind and benevolent, almost 
to a fault. The fiery nature of the future Girondist 
leader lay as yet concealed under an outward sem- 
blance of calm and rather cold philanthropy — "like 
a volcano," says d'Alembert, "covered with snow." 
Julie de Lespinasse alone seems to have divined 
something of the alarming possibilities involved in 
this enigmatical personality. 

" It is too good of you, kind Condorcet," she 
writes, on one occasion, "to live on familiar terms 
with us. You differ so widely from all the other 
people whom I have respected and admired that 
I am at times tempted to believe in some mixture 
of the supernatural or demoniacal in your char- 
acter. I repeat, demoniacal, for if kind Condorcet 
chose, he could be as vindictive as Pascal is in the 
Provincials." 

The external coldness of the philosophic Marquis in 
no wise guaranteed him against the assaults of the 
tender passion. Though not an ill-living man he seems, 
up to the date of his marriage — a perfectly successful 
one — in 1787, to have been always in love with some 
lady or other, and never to have met with any appreci- 
ation from the object of his affection. The first of these 
flames of whom we have any record was the charm- 
ing Mademoiselle Pancoucke, the sister of the famous 
bookseller, and afterwards the wife of Suard. When, 
long after, in the days of the Terror, Condorcet, flying 
for life, sought refuge under Suard's roof, and was, to 
all intents and purposes, driven forth by the master of 
the house to meet his fate, the world remembered this 
early rivalry, and saw in Suard's action the settlement 
of an old but unforgotten grievance. Next, if we are 
to believe the bantering references of d'Alembert and 



230 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Julie, we find Condorcet in the toils of Mademoiselle 
d'Usse — sister to the Marquis d'Usse mentioned in 
an earlier chapter — a lady of mature years, who in her 
turn had lost her heart to Condorcet's almost septua- 
genarian uncle, the venerable Bishop of Lisieux. To 
the obdurate Mademoiselle d'Uss^ succeeded Madame 
de Meulan, a young married lady of considerable 
personal attractions, for whom the susceptible Mar- 
quis long entertained a profound though platonic 
admiration. He paid his court by the somewhat 
original method of translating Seneca for the lady's 
benefit, but Madame de Meulan remained unmoved 
by this exhibition of sentiment, and heartlessly re- 
jected Condorcet's modest entreaty that she would 
permit herself to be adored without any hope of 
return. Then ensued a long interlude during which 
the slighted one's lovelorn and lackadaisical demean- 
our laid him open to the good-humoured gibes, and 
at times to the serious remonstrances, of his two 
older friends, neither of whom, we may observe, was 
at all in a position favourable to stone-throwing. For 
d'Alembert was devoting his life to a woman who 
never loved him as he loved her, and Julie was 
hereafter to break her heart for a man in every 
way unworthy. 

The explanation of Condorcet's persistent ill-success 
with the opposite sex is to be found, no doubt, in his 
external deficiencies. His fine face was singularly 
lacking in animation, his bearing awkward, and his 
manners, though gentle and courteous, left much to 
be desired. His disregard for the conventionalities, 
indeed, was in some respects carried to an extent 
which, at the present day, we find difificulty in 
realising, as will appear in the extracts given below, 




LE MARQUIS DE CONDORCET 

SCHOOL OF GREUZE. IN THE MUSEE DE VERSAILLES 



^ 



FRIENDS IN COUN€IL 231 

from the three-cornered correspondence maintained 
by the friends. Under the surface tone of gay banter 
it is easy to detect a note of genuine and affectionate 
solicitude, 

" My zeal for your education " (Condorcet is away 
in the country and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
is dictating to d'Alembert), "continues even in your 
absence. Above all, I advise you not to eat your 
lips or your nails. Nothing is more indigestible. 
I have heard a great doctor say so. . . . Here is 
another hint for your instruction. It is the sugges- 
tion of ray secretary [d'Alembert], who, as you know, is 
a great authority on such subjects, and has been 
specially entrusted by Mademoiselle d'Uss^ with the 
task of forming your manners. Don't bend your 
body in two every time you speak, like a priest saying 
his confiteor at the altar. I f you persist in it, you will 
have to say your Tnecl culpa for it some day. You 
learned that bad habit from Mademoiselle d'Ussd 
She always makes you bend close over her so that your 
conversation may be more confidential. ... I also 
recommend some attention to your ears, which are 
always in need of washing {sic !),...! send you 
no news. In the first place, I know none. In the 
second, I don't believe you care for it. In the third, 
it is a great bore, and, at the worst, you are sure to 
hear everything some time, if you only wait long 
enough. In the fourth place, because my secretary 
is in a hurry to get off to a dinner with some of his 
cronies, for everybody has cronies of his own." 

^'■July 1769. 

" To begin with, monsieur, you are wrong in not 
dating your letters. This is very important advice. 



232 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

. . . You are wrong besides in working at geometry- 
like a madman, bolting your supper like an ogre, and 
sleeping as little as a hare. You may be quite sure it 
is not my secretary who says this. He would never 
have written that line of Voltaire's about time : 

" ' 'Tis wasted, save when spent on Love alone ! ' 

He would have put — 

" ' 'Tis wasted save when spent on Algebra I ' " 

"Paris, Monday, August 'jth, 1769. 

Mean time thirty-five minutes and four 

seconds past nine a.m. 

" There, monsieur, is something like a date ! You 
can't cavil at that. My secretary never knows what 
he is saying or doing (this is utter nonsense — note 
by the secretary), so you must not be surprised that 
he has mistaken July for August. (The secretary 
replies that he was apparently told to write August, 
and not July, and that he writes what he is told.) . . . 

"And so you differ from Voltaire, monsieur, and 
think time wasted, except on geometry ? . . . 

" (Quite right, my dear colleague. Never mind the 
women and Voltaire.)" 

" October i$th, 1771. 

** My cross-grained secretary is so condescending 
as to write to my kind Condorcet, There are not 
many people for whom he will give himself the 
trouble. Like me, he is anxious and distressed about 
your bad health. You must let us know how you 
are, and you must tell the truth about it, and not 
try to spare our feelings. Is your mind calmer .f* Is 
your head more steady ? Has absence (from the 
unappreciative Madame de Meulan) made you worse } 



FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 233 

Are you resolved to live upon sorrow ? (and folly ! — 
note by the secretary). Would it not be better to make 
an effort to get well ? " 

In a letter written about the same time, with her own 
hand and without the co-operation of d'Alembert, Julie 
takes her friend still more roundly to task. 

** It seems to me that it is your own fault if you are 
ill. If you had a little courage, your mind and body 
would be in a better condition. You are just as inex- 
perienced now as when you left school, yet reflection 
ought to supply the place of experience. . . . Any- 
thing is better than the way you have been behaving 
for the last two months. Be honest with yourself, tell 
yourself that you must get over it. . . . Do not wear 
out your feelings and ruin your health to no purpose. 
Exert a little fortitude, determine to be tranquil, if you 
cannot be happy. All your friends are deeply grieved at 
the state into which you have allowed yourself to fall." 

Here, in conclusion, is a later extract of more cheer- 
ful character, dictated, as the more cheerful letters 
always are, for when writing direct to Condorcet 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse allowed herself to dwell 
upon her own troubles to an extent which considera- 
tion for d'Alembert did not otherwise permit. 

June 25, 1774. 

\ 

"I regret you every day, monsieur, and expect your 
return with impatience. There are days when I really 
cannot get on without you. For example, M. de la 
Harpe read aloud his Barmicides^ the other day. There 
are very fine lines in it, and, altogether, I liked it very 
much, and I said, * If M. de Condorcet were here, I 

^ A tragedy by La Harpe. 



234 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

should have this pleasure over again to-morrow. He 
would have remembered all the best parts.' The 
day before yesterday he [La Harpe] read us some 
charming stanzas, the regrets of a forsaken lover. 
Well, monsieur, my secretary and I do not remember 
one word of them ! We only know that we liked 
them. . . . Farewell, monsieur ; the secretary sends 
his kind regards, and says he has had enough of this. 
The phrase, you will observe, is characteristic of him, 
and distinguished by his peculiar grace and charm of 
manner." 

A talent for friendship does not always imply an 
equal capacity for family affection, yet that Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse possessed the second no less than the 
first of these qualities is plainly shown by her attitude 
towards Abel de Vichy, the only one of her delightful 
kindred who can be said to have had, so far as she 
was concerned, either a heart or a conscience. For 
that other once-beloved brother, Camille d'Albon, she 
retained no feeling but one of mistrust and dislike. 
Every lingering vestige of tenderness for him had 
perished in that miserable interview long ago at the 
grate of the Lyon convent. All her references to him 
and his family breathe a spirit of cold and bitter hos- 
tility most unusual with her. 

"It seems to me," she writes to Abel, ''that you 
scarcely see anything of your d'Albon relations. Is it 
because you don't care about them ? I should think 
that very natural." 

And again : 

" I could expect nothing else but ill-usage all my life 
from everyone who bears the name of d'Albon or has 
any connection with it." 



FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 135 

Even her love for children, a strong feeling with 
her, seems almost in abeyance with regard to Camille's 
son and heir. She praises the boy's beauty indeed, 
but contemplates without emotion the probability of 
his death from lung disease. 

With the de Vichys she was, despite the scenes 
which Champrond, in days gone by, had witnessed, 
on a very different footing. Her letters to Abel are 
full of solicitude for his mother's health and well-being. 
Even her terrible father receives tokens of affectionate 
remembrance. When Gaspard and Diane come to stay 
at Paris she sees them every day, and together they 
discuss Abel's resplendent virtues and Abel's atrocious 
handwriting, almost after the fashion of an orthodox 
family conclave. For her second pupil, Abel's scape- 
grace younger brother, Julie keeps a corner in her 
heart ; she pleads for him with his righteously in- 
dignant relatives, and speaks with feeling of his death. 
But her full affection was given to Abel himself, and 
seems to have been whole-heartedly returned. M. de 
S^gur thinks that an increase in his tenderness for 
her can be traced from the day when he discovered 
the true nature of his relationship to her, as recorded 
in his diary of 23rd July 1769: "I have had a long 
conversation with my mother on the subject of 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. It is a horrible story ! " 
His good heart prompted him by brotherly kindness 
to make what amends he could for the sins of his 
father and mother, and his resolution was not alto- 
gether in vain. 

Julie had evidently failed to inspire her pupil with 
her own passion for books, and her letters to him have 
scarcely any of the literary allusions which flow, as if 
insensibly, from her pen when she is writing to Con- 



236 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

dorcet or Guibert. On another important point they 
were equally out of sympathy, for Abel was an ortho- 
dox Catholic. His sister shows her usual tact and 
consideration in avoiding all friction on this account. 
Once she falls into the mistake of putting down his 
name as a subscriber to the Encyclopedia, but on 
learning that he is not pleased at once assures him 
that she can easily find someone to take his place. 
When he is in search of a tutor for his sons she 
undertakes, with d'Alembert's assistance, to find him 
a suitable person — clerical, if required. In all the 
concerns of his life, great and small, her sympathy 
and helpfulness are inexhaustible. When he wishes 
to leave the army and settle down on his estates, 
Julie, though opposed to this measure, arranges 
matters so that he may suffer as little as possible 
on account of it in the opinion of those in authority. 
By active canvassing, and the exertion of her enor- 
mous personal influence, she procures him the coveted 
honour of the Cross of St Louis. She takes all the 
interest of the normal maiden aunt in every detail 
concerning his children, though she is not pleased 
that their number should be limited to two ; for, like 
most unmarried people, she is cheerfully ready to pile 
on others the burdens in which she herself has no 
share. She strongly counsels inoculation, alleging 
her own case as a lamentable warning against 
neglecting that precaution. She gives advice as to 
the choice of a health resort. She executes millinery 
and dressmaking commissions for his wife, and rears 
dogs of high lineage for himself. 

It is a significant proof of the horror instilled into 
her by her early experience of the country that she 
never paid a visit to Abel at his own house, and 



FRIENDS IN COUNCIL 237 

probably died without having made the acquaintance 
of his children. But when her brother and his young 
wife came for a short time to Paris her zeal and 
assiduity knew no bounds. She was determined 
that they should have, in Transatlantic phrase, "a 
good time," should go everywhere and see everything. 
Her influence, popularity, and knowledge of the world 
must have made her an ideal guide in Parisian society, 
and all three seem to have enjoyed their time together 
thoroughly, though they were pretty well worn out by 
the end of it. 

The current impression of Julie de Lespinasse, 
derived mainly from the " Letters to Guibert," is of 
a creature all fire and passion, unfitted, if not by too 
much goodness, yet certainly by too much brightness, 
for human nature's daily food. But such a belief does 
no justice to the manifold capabilities of her complex 
personality. Though she was destined to be neither 
wife nor mother, it is plain that the home-making in- 
stinct of the normal woman, the capacity for domestic 
love and loyalty, and for maternal tenderness, lay 
deep and strong in her nature. That she often, in 
secret, rebelled against the limitations of her lot 
there can be no doubt, and there came, at last, a time 
when it seemed that these, as if by magic, were about 
to be removed. One chance of happiness — a chance 
in ten thousand — was to be hers, but that gleam of 
hope was to shine briefly and fitfully, and to set in the 
darkness of utter despair and, alas ! of remorse. 



CHAPTER XIX 

THE COMING OF LOVE 

ACCORDING to Marmontel, who, for all his fine 
feelings and flowery language, can be spiteful 
enough when he pleases, Julie de Lespinasse was 
by no means averse to the idea of changing her con- 
dition. On the face of it, this does not seem either 
a very improbable or a very damaging accusation, but 
when Marmontel adds that she was always keenly on 
the lookout for an eligible husband, and that her re- 
searches in this direction failed one after another, he 
goes directly counter to everything we know of her 
character and actions. "This scheming to get her- 
self married," says Marmontel's kinsman, Morellet, " is 
altogether at variance with her noble and impassioned 
nature," and everyone who has read her letters 
attentively will agree with him. 

Yet Marmontel's atrocious assertion may contain 
the one grain of truth which lends a falsehood its 
worst virulence. Being human, and a woman, 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse must needs have seen 
with some surprise, and even with some resentment, 
that amongst all the men who eagerly sought her 
company, and paid her a homage so flattering and so 
respectful, not one should have wished to make her 
his wife. From an English point of view it is in- 
deed an amazing circumstance, since women popular 
in society have certainly never, in this country, been 
entirely without suitors. But Frenchmen, though 

238 



THE COMING OF LOVE 239 

they claim to excel Englishmen in making love, are 
willing to concede that, when it comes to marrying 
for love, the superiority is on the other side, and 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse had two heavy handicaps 
in the matrimonial race — illegitimacy and poverty. It 
must be remembered that her income, though suffi- 
cient for her own wants, was entirely in the form of 
life-annuities, and she could thus bring no capital into 
a husband's family. Mercier, commenting on the un- 
paralleled increase of old maids in Paris (it somehow 
always is unparalleled, in every country and every 
age), attributes it to the fact that these ill-advised 
females have signed contracts for annuities — a fatal 
bar, he says, to the signing of contracts of marriage. 
And one of Mademoiselle de Launay's abortive love 
affairs came to an end owing to a similar proceeding 
on the part of the gentleman — entered upon, as she 
firmly believed, from malice prepense, as an excuse 
for breaking off his semi-engagement to her. To 
suitors of every degree the want of capital would 
present a serious difficulty, while those of good family 
would have to face, in addition, the less material 
barrier of an origin worse than obscure. 

We must further consider that Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse, at the period of her greatest popu- 
larity, was, according to the standard of that time, 
no longer a young woman, and moreover hopelessly 
disfigured by the small-pox. M. de Segur quotes 
a significant phrase of hers, apparently meant in 
apology for her independent mode of life. "It does 
not matter what one does, when one is thirty years 
old, and, to use fine language, ravaged by disease.'' It 
plainly shows that, whatever inward suffering such 
an admission may have cost her, she did not fall into 



240 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

the mistake of overrating her matrimonial chances. 
The conventional dogmas of her day, founded, like 
all dogmas concerning women, on tradition rather 
than fact, taught that only in the heyday of youth 
could one of the inferior sex hope to inspire love, . 
just as they taught that no woman was capable of be- | 
ing a friend to another woman. But as the records 
of that period abound in instances of loyal and gen- 
erous friendship between woman and woman, even 
so they display many striking contradictions to the 
"youth and beauty" theory, and the most remark- 
able of these is furnished by Julie de Lespinasse 
herself. 

In that same year (1764) which witnessed the 
rupture between Madame du Deffand and her 
companion there had been a change in the Spanish i 
Embassy at Paris. The incoming ambassador was \ 
the Count de Fuentes, a nobleman of the highest ' 
rank, who, a few months after his arrival, was joined 
by his son and heir, the Marquis de Mora. Though 
but a youth of twenty. Mora had already lived through 
a cycle of experiences such as have fallen to the lot 
of few men at twice his age. When only twelve 
years old he had found himself an officer in the 
Spanish army, and — -a husband. His marriage (a 
family arrangement designed to end a protracted 
lawsuit) was, as may be supposed, in the first 
instance only equivalent to a betrothal, but four 
years later, when Mora was sixteen and his poor 
little bride a year younger, they received the 
Church's supplementary benediction as man and wife. 
Shortly after we find them in England, to which 
country the Count de Fuentes was then ambassador. 
Here they were seen by that invaluable gossip- 



THE COMING OF LOVE 241 

monger, Horace Walpole, whose verdict on their 
personal appearance is not of the most favourable. 

" M. de Fuentes is a halfpenny print of my Lord 
Huntingdon. His wife homely, but seems good- 
humoured and civil. The son does not degenerate 
from such high-born ugliness. The daughter-in-law 
was sick, and they say is not ugly, and has as good 
a set of teeth as one can have, when one has but 
two and those black." ^ 

And on another occasion : 

" No foreigners were there, but the son and 
daughter-in-law of M. de Fuentes. . . . Madame de 
Mora danced first." 

The following year (1761) a daughter was born 
to this immature couple, but, perhaps happily, she 
did not long survive. Nearly three years later, the 
Marquis and Marchioness de Mora having then 
returned to Spain, a son and heir was born, but at 
the cost of the girl- mother's life. Left thus a 
widower, Mora joined his father, now in Paris, 
desiring perhaps to seek distraction from his grief. 
It is to be feared that he was not long in finding 
it, for the poor child to whom he had been married 
seems to have been a person of no account, either 
beyond her home or within it. 

A deeper sorrow than any that could reasonably 
be expected of this boy-widower would scarcely have 
been proof against the intoxicating influences of his 

1 It is worth noting that the charming young Duchesse de Bourgogne, 
wife to Louis XIV.'s grandson, was in much the same case. The " strong 
white teeth" of previous generations seem, indeed, to have had no exist- 
ence save in the dreams of reactionists, while the creations of the latter- 
day dentist are a consoling and palpable reahty. 

Q 



242 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

new environment. Everything conspired to make 
Paris delightful to him — his father's position, his 
own familiarity with the language and literature of the 
country (he had been trained under a French tutor), 
and especially his personal charm ; for, despite the 
depreciatory remarks of Horace Walpole, he was 
considered, both in Spain and France, " a fine-look- 
ing fellow," tall, graceful, black-eyed, with a sweet 
and animated expression and the exquisite manners 
characteristic of his nation. He speedily became 
the rage in those exalted circles, both at Versailles 
and Paris, to which, in right of his birth, he naturally 
belonged, and the first year or two of his residence 
in the great metropolis seems to have been spent 
in a round of elegant frivolity, trenching on dis- 
sipation. 

Yet all the time, beneath this surface levity, there 
lay the capacity and the desire for better things 
inclining him to sympathise rather with the noble 
army of toilers and thinkers than with the gay crowd 
of social butterflies. This fundamental earnestness of 
character had been fostered by the influence of his 
father-in-law, the Count d'Aranda, in whose house- 
hold he had lived during the earlier years of his 
premature marriage. Aranda, who is best known to 
posterity for the part which, as minister, he played in 
the expulsion of the Jesuits, passed in Conservative 
Spain for a Liberal of the first water, and in France 
was highly honoured by the Encyclopedists for his 
devotion to the cause of progress and reform. It was 
only to be expected that Mora, standing in so close a 
relation to Aranda, and imbued with his ideas, should 
have much in common with the adherents of the En- 
cyclopedia, and towards them, as towards his natural 



THE COMING OF LOVE 243 

affinities, he seems to have gravitated so soon as the 
first glamour of Court life had worn off. 

To have relations with the Encyclopedic party- 
meant, sooner or later, to make the acquaintance of 
Julie de Lespinasse, but Mora's first meeting with her 
dates only from December 1 766, when he had already 
been two years in Paris. A letter of Julie's, perhaps 
addressed to Holbach, and quoted by M. de Segur, 
describes the great event and the impression produced 
upon her by the charming young Spaniard. To our 
more sophisticated generation there is something a 
little repellent in the hyperbolical praises which she 
lavishes on the perfections — moral, intellectual and 
social — of this youthful paragon ; yet there is no 
doubt that the verdict of all Mora's contemporaries 
was substantially in agreement with hers. The conclu- 
sion, however, is of no period or country, being no 
doubt as old and as universal as love itself: "Don't 
go and imagine that I am in love with him ! " 

We smile, half sadly ; yet the chances are that she 
spoke in absolute sincerity. Almost, by eighteenth- 
century convention, a middle-aged woman (she had 
just completed her thirty-fourth year) ; older than her 
age through ill-health and the hardships of her earlier 
life ; fresh from the terrible illness which had destroyed 
every claim to good looks ; poor, and the child of dis- 
honour — how could she be guilty of such madness as 
to cast her eyes on this fine flower of the proudest 
aristocracy in Europe, this idol of beautiful and high- 
born ladies ? Madness it might well indeed have 
seemed to anyone, and of a kind only to be surpassed 
by -the greater madness of expecting any return to an 
attachment so misplaced. Yet here it was the impos- 
sible that happened, for it was destined that Julie de 



244 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Lespinasse should be loved by this man as few women 
are loved by men, and indeed far better than she 
loved him. 

In view of all the above considerations it seems prob- 
able enough that, although Mademoiselle de Lespinasse 
afterwards dated the beginning of her attachment to 
Mora from this period, she really did not yet believe 
herself to be in love with him, and it is still more 
probable that she did not contemplate the possibility 
of his being in love with her. Yet one would fain 
know with what feelings she heard (for so interesting 
a morsel of Parisian gossip must surely have pene- 
trated to her) that the Marquis de Mora was just then 
in the thick of a family quarrel, having for its subject 
a second marriage of convenience projected for him 
by his relatives and by him strenuously resisted ? 
Whether this opposition arose entirely, as M. de Segur 
seems to think, from reluctance to abandon the liberty 
which he had found so sweet, or whether he had 
already begun to realise that in the tiny salon of the 
Rue Bellechasse was contained the one woman in the 
world for him, it is certain that he was successful in 
carrying his point. But the relations with his parents 
were in consequence somewhat strained, and his leave 
of absence (already according to modern views inord- 
inately prolonged) had also expired, and in January 
1767, a few weeks after his first meeting with Julie de 
Lespinasse, he returned to Spain. 

Their acquaintance, when barely begun, was thus 
severed, under conditions which offered no great hope 
of its renewal. There followed an interval of nearly ten 
months, occupied, for Julie, with such interests as I 
have already attempted to describe — without, the salon 
and its ever-increasing success ; within, the pleasant 



THE COMING OF LOVE 245 

company of d'Alembert and Condorcet, For Mora 
the period seems to have been more eventful, and to 
have coincided with an extraordinary development of 
intellect and character. Though barely twenty-three 
years old, he had already attained the precocious 
maturity inevitable with those who begin life too soon. 
By what we may designate the " Young Spanish " 
party, then much in ^ogue, he was enthusiastically 
hailed as the coming statesman, the future apostle of 
reform, the destined renovator of his country's great- 
ness. Yet neither these brilliant, if chimerical, antici- 
pations, nor the incontestable social triumphs of the 
present, nor even a flirtation with a widowed duchess 
of great beauty, who certainly cherished designs on 
his heart and hand, could reconcile the young Mar- 
quis to his exile from Paris. To return thither was 
his object and ambition, and although the death of 
his three-year-old son (in July 1767) caused him deep 
and genuine sorrow there is no evading the fact that 
he used it as a stepping-stone for the attainment of 
that desired end. The leave of absence hitherto re- 
fused (very properly, as it seems to us), by a stony- 
hearted Minister of War, was granted to him in the 
character of a bereaved father desiring to seek con- 
solation in the bosom of his family still resident at 
Paris, and late in the autumn of the same year he 
once more joined them there. 

With his arrival, a new era began both for him and 
for Julie de Lespinasse. Whether the recollection of 
her had been amongst the influences which drew him 
with such force to Paris is uncertain, but with the 
closer intimacy following on his return came a feeling 
such as all the facile gallantries of his precocious 
adolescence had been powerless to arouse in him, and 



246 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

such as it is extremely difficult adequately to convey 
to English readers. To our colder and more reticent 
natures the southern warmth of passion, the ecstatic 
chivalry of devotion, poured out by Mora upon the 
lady of his heart, seem inevitably, though most unjustly, 
tinged with unreality, and even, to some extent, with 
ridicule. This last tendency is heightened by that 
unlucky difference — on what is commonly called the 
wrong side — of nearly twelve years, the only one of 
the barriers separating the pair which, from the point 
of view of romance, can be admitted to have had any 
validity ; for birth and wealth have always been held 
to be trifles in comparison with true love ; and even 
beauty, as we must all have observed, often has its 
existence in lovers' eyes rather than in objective 
reality, while health, alas ! is never made of any 
account at all. But we must remember that Mora, 
owing to the peculiar circumstances of his life, was, 
both in his own estimation and that of others, much 
older than his age. 

" I am young," he writes about this time to his 
friend, the Duke de Villa- Hermosa, "but no man, 
however old, has had a harder and more varied ex- 
perience of the world than I. I believe that I know 
it [the world], and I know that I despise it." 

" He had seen everything, had passed judgment 
on everything, even to weariness and satiety," writes 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, in reference to this same 
period. It was no case of a simple, inexperienced 
youth falling victim to the wiles of a mature woman 
versed in the world's wisdom. Most cogent of all is 
the fact that Mora, during his remaining six years of 
life, retained, amidst (difficulties apparently all but in- 
superable, his devotion unaltered, and may almost be 



THE COMING OF LOVE 247 

said to have died with Julie's name on his lips. Per- 
haps it may, in homely phrase, be granted that he 
knew his own business best, and that, young as he 
was, his choice had been made once and for all. 

To the lonely, storm-tossed woman, no less than 
to Mora in his premature disillusionment and world- 
weariness, this attachment seemed the awakening to a 
new life. At first, it appears, she felt an honourable 
reluctance to accept the devotion so freely tendered, 
but her lover made light of every argument against 
his suit. '' You love me," he urged, "and where love 
is, nothing else is of any account." "And soon," she 
says, "he persuaded me" to believe him. All 
the latent passion of her nature awoke in response 
to his, and with hyperbolic fervour he declared 
that, in the art of loving, even the women of his 
own ardent south were mere children in comparison 
with her. 

The happy dream continued for some months with- 
out interruption. Mora inhabited his father's hotel 
in the Rue de I'Universite, quite close to the Rue 
Bellechasse, and probably managed to appear most 
evenings at the receptions of Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse, and doubtless often to secure a private 
conversation by arriving before the other guests.^ 
" More than once, we saw him worshipping her," says 
Marmontel, alluding perhaps to tete-a-tite interviews 
of this sort, inopportunely interrupted by some new 
arrival. But at the end of about six months Mora's 
leave of absence, wonderfully elastic as it was, came 
again to an end, and he was obliged, for a time, to 
return to Spain. His route was so arranged as to 

1 At four o'clock, she herself says, she was nearly always alone, and 
this was the time chosen by anyone desiring a private conversation. 



248 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

include a visit to Voltaire ^ at Geneva — a visit chiefly 
remarkable for the impression made by the young 
Spaniard upon his host. " A young man of most 
unusual merit," the future inaugurator of "a new age 
to the Iberians," are the phrases which he employs, 
and he expresses a fervent hope that Mora will 
soon be included in the Spanish ministry. These 
opinions, so far from being peculiar to Voltaire, are 
confirmed by all who were personally acquainted with 
Mora, and in the absence of any more direct testi- 
mony to his abilities (for M. de S^gur has discovered 
that even his letters to his family have been de- 
stroyed), we are obliged to suppose that they must 
have had some foundation in fact. 

The next twelve months seem to have been mainly 
employed by the Marquis (among whose merits de- 
votion to military duty can certainly not be reckoned) 
in the usual efforts to obtain leave. The marriage 
of his sister with his especial friend, the Duke of Villa- 
Hermosa, was the pretext on which it was at last 
granted him, and the month of June (1769) found him 
once more in Paris, and more in love than ever. 

About this time, apparently, it began to dawn upon 
the Count de Fuentes, that the romantic passion, 
which he had doubtless hitherto regarded as mere 
harmless sckwdrmerei, was, on the contrary, directed 
towards 4;he very palpable and definite end of mar- 
riage. A more unpleasing discovery could scarcely 
be imagined. He was well acquainted with Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse, and had a high respect for her 
character and abilities, but, naturally enough, he was 
far from regarding her in the light of an eligible 
daughter-in-law. Much more promising candidates 
1 The end of April 1768. 



THE COMING OF LOVE 249 

for that position — such, for example, as the young 
dowager above-mentioned — had not seemed to him 
good enough for the cherished heir to all his honours 
and titles. He determined to cut the matter short, 
but his paternal authority, backed by the representa- 
tions of the whole family, was powerless to shake the 
young man's resolution. His parents, however, in- 
sisted that he should return to Spain on the expira- 
tion of his leave (early in 1770), and, as it would have 
been quite impossible for him in those circumstances to 
procure an extension of it, he was obliged to submit. 

But if his family supposed that by this separation 
they could efface the image of Mora's beloved from 
his heart, they were very much in error. Realising 
that, so long as he remained in the army, he might 
never again be allowed to visit Paris (for in those 
patriarchal times an understanding to that effect 
could easily be entered into between the Count de 
Fuentes and the Minister of War), he decided at last 
to abandon his profession ; and in the winter of 1770 
he carried this decision into effect, much to the con- 
sternation of his friends, who had been predicting a 
brilliant future for him in that calling. (He had been 
made a general a few months previously.) Ill-health 
was the ground assigned by him for his resignation, 
and unfortunately this plea had more validity than 
was at first supposed. In January 1771, when Mora, 
exulting in his new-won liberty, was on the point of 
setting out for France, he was suddenly laid prostrate 
by haemorrhage of the lungs. His recovery was slow, 
and as soon as he could travel the doctors insisted 
on his seeking a warmer climate, and it was not till 
August 1771, that he was able to carry out his scheme 
of returning to Paris. 



250 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

It is easy to imagine the joy of the lovers reunited 
after that long interval of a year and a half passed in 
such cruel alternations of hope and fear. But over 
their joy there brooded henceforth a shadow never 
more to be lifted — the awful shadow of death. Con- 
sumption — a disease hereditary on one side of Mora's 
family — had marked him for her own, and every 
chance of escape was destroyed by the hideous treat- 
ment then in vogue, which consisted mainly of bleed- 
ing and starving. The ominous haemorrhage continued 
to recur, at shorter and shorter intervals, and with 
increasing severity. M. de Segur, with his usual in- 
sight, has observed that Mora in these circumstances 
was sustained by the hopefulness peculiar to consump- 
tive patients, while his betrothed, for whom no such 
illusions existed, tasted at times all the anguish of 
despair. Everything, as she justly said, was against 
a happy ending. Even should Mora recover, the op- 
position of his family to the contemplated marriage 
remained implacable as ever. During the last year 
or two, troubles had come thick upon the Count de 
Fuentes. The expenses of his position as ambassador 
had plunged him into grave pecuniary difficulties, and 
his wife, long in failing health, was now threatened 
with the same dread malady which had assailed her 
son. Fuentes decided to resign his post and return 
to Spain, and he strenuously insisted that Mora 
should follow him thither. The paternal authority, 
stronger even now in Spain than in most European 
countries, was in this case reinforced by the entreaties 
of a death-stricken mother, and by the pronouncement 
of the physicians, who declared that the Parisian climate 
was unfavourable to Mora. He gave way, but with 
the firm resolution that it should be for the last time. 



THE COMING OF LOVE 251 

"I could never bring myself to go," he writes to 
Condorcet, "if I were not sure of a return which will 
fulfil all my hopes and wishes." 

And, animated by his indomitable courage, even 
Julie de Lespinasse hoped, at times, against hope. 

" Every circumstance, every event, every reason 
physical and moral is against me," she writes, "but 
he is so strong for me that he will not allow me to 
doubt of his return." 



CHAPTER XX 

A PINCHBECK HERO 

WE now approach the strangest point in this 
strange life-history — the period of JuHe's exis- 
tence which, presenting as it does a psychological 
problem perhaps unparalleled in human experience, 
has long been a source of unfailing interest to certain 
sections of the intellectual world. It is a story no less 
sad than strange, for henceforth our affection and 
sympathy for this fascinating woman must, on her own 
showing, be qualified by disapproval, and for the first 
time in her life she is plainly not so much sinned 
against, as sinning. The severest censor will scarcely 
maintain that in her relations with the de Vichys, 
the d'Albons, and Madame du Deffand, the balance 
of blame lay on her side. But she was now to be 
found wanting towards two persons who had deserved 
nothing at her hands but good — namely, the Marquis 
de Mora himself, and d'Alembert. So far as abstract 
considerations of right and wrong are concerned, the 
first named of these men was beyond all comparison 
the more injured of the two. But, as Fate would have 
it, he died without learning the extent of his wrongs, 
while d'Alembert tasted day by day the bitterness of 
estrangement from the woman whom he had loved so 
devotedly. To him, therefore, our pity is chiefly due. 
And yet it is in regard to her treatment of him that 
Julie's conduct admits most readily of excuse, perhaps 
because it admits most readily of explanation. 

252 



A PINCHBECK HERO 253 

In order to judge her fairly we must first realise, as 
she did, the preposterous assumption which, in d'Alem- 
bert's view, formed the basis of their peculiar friendship 
— namely, that while he did not find it convenient to 
offer her marriage himself, or perhaps feared a refusal, 
she was on no account to think of marrying anyone 
else. It can scarcely be imputed as sin to Julie that 
she did not admit the validity of such a claim, nor, if 
we consider that the desire of pleasing and the dislike 
of giving pain were, for good or evil, among her 
strongest characteristics, can we greatly blame her 
for carefully concealing from d'Alembert all hopes 
and expectations of a matrimonial description. Other 
causes besides contributed to enforce upon her the 
strictest reticence. The difficulties in the way of the 
projected marriage were, as has already been shown, 
enormous, and of a nature certain to be aggravated by 
publicity. Hence the whole scheme was kept a secret 
from all save one or two intimate friends, such as the 
Suards and Condorcet. So well indeed was the secret 
guarded that, till very lately, it was considered by 
biographers of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse ^ an open 
question whether any project of marriage existed at 
all. But the unwearied researches of M. de Segur, 
among the archives of Mora's family and elsewhere, 
have now set the matter beyond doubt, thus clearing 
the memories of both lovers from a suspicion equally 
injurious and unjust. 

The most incomprehensible part of the whole story 
is that, while many of Julie's acquaintance who did not 
believe in a betrothal were fully conscious that a love- 
affair was in progress, d'Alembert alone had no sus- 

1 It was even hinted by Marmontel that JuHe tried to ensnare Mora, 
who disdained so unworthy an alliance. 



254 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

picion of either. He was well acquainted with the 
young Marquis, and approved of him highly ; saw 
him constantly in the company of Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse, and entirely realised that she took an 
unusual interest in him. But to d'Alembert the 
blessed word friendship accounted for everything. 
Men are in general curiously slow to realise the 
impression made by other men upon the women of 
their own circle, but d'Alembert certainly carried this 
masculine quality to an altogether unusual extent. 
Even so, Julie, as her after history proves, possessed 
in excess the opposite or feminine characteristic of 
susceptibility to the slightest suspicion of rivalry in 
love. It is hard to say which failing is responsible 
for most misunderstanding and misery. 

D'Alembert's obtuseness was doubtless, in a way, 
convenient, but it is easy to understand that it must 
have been terribly irritating. Constantly in his com- 
pany, sharing with him every detail of her daily life, 
yet feeling that from him of all others she must 
hide the agonies of alarm, the ecstasies of renewed 
hope, which absorbed her whole being, Julie found 
herself tried at times beyond the limits of endurance. 
Great as was her power of self-control, she was far too 
sensitive and highly strung to have a really even 
temper. In the old days, at Madame du Deffand's, 
one of her admirers had gently ^ reproached her with 
her deficiency in this respect. The independence of 
her present life had, no doubt, removed some of the 
most wearing incitements to irritability, but on the 
other hand her health, since the small-pox, had rarely 
been even tolerable. To judge from allusions in her 
own letters and those of her friends, she must have 

* In verse. The writer is unknown. 



A PINCHBECK HERO 255 

suffered continually from feverish attacks, coughs, 
neuralgia, rheumatism, and, above all, sleeplessness. 
Before the world she bore up with marvellous courage, 
alike against these ills and the mental tortures of 
anxiety, now often added to them. But courage of 
this sort must give way sometimes in private, and 
when it does the person nearest at hand — in the 
present case, d'Alembert — is always the first to suffer. 

" Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was no longer the 
same with d'Alembert," says Marmontel ; " he had not 
only to endure coldness from her, but often melancholy 
and ill-temper. He bore it all in silence, only con- 
fiding his unhappiness to me." 

Probably Marmontel was the friend who, as d'Alem- 
bert himself informs us, ventured once to reproach 
Julie for her unkindness, and received the reply 
that she reproached herself no less, but that it arose 
from the impossibility of explaining the cause of her 
irritability and depression. That she did reproach 
herself, and continually endeavoured, not altogether 
vainly, to make amends there can be no doubt. 
"Ah, would that I might still endure those moments 
of bitterness ! " sighed d'Alembert, after her death ; 
" she knew so well how to sweeten them and make 
me forget them ! " When he was ill, or in trouble, 
her sympathy seems to have been as ready and help- 
ful as ever. In the month of July 1770 (at the time 
when Mora, absent in Spain, was still planning his 
release from the service), she writes to Condorcet in 
terms unmistakably insp>ed by genuine and affec- 
tionate solicitude. 

" Help me, monsieur, I appeal alike to your friend- 
ship and your goodness. Our friend M. d'Alembert is 



256 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in the most alarming condition. He is frightfully- 
wasted, does not sleep at all, and only forces himself 
to eat Worst of all, he is terribly depressed, and 
takes no interest in anything. The only remedy is 
a complete change. . . . We all want him to make 
an excursion to Italy, he does not altogether refuse, 
but he will never go so far alone, nor do I wish that 
he should. He needs the company of a kind and 
careful friend such as you. You are a companion 
after his own heart, you alone can rouse him from 
the condition which makes us all anxious." 

She proceeds to suggest that he should write to 
d'Alembert proposing the Italian tour, as if on his 
own account, and adds: "You will quite understand 
that he must not know I have written to you." Then 
comes this postscript, irresistibly reminding us of Mr 
Micawber : " M. d'Alembert has just caught me in 
the act of writing, so I have frankly confessed that 
I was suggesting the Italian trip to you. He seems 
quite content with the idea, so do you arrange 
it all with him quickly, lest he should change his 
mind." 

Condorcet amiably undertook what was required of 
him, and, although the Italian tour resolved itself into 
the less ambitious form of a month's visit to Voltaire 
at Ferney, the benefit derived by d'Alembert was 
considerable. In the following year, indeed. Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse writes again to Condorcet : " I 
am afraid he may relapse into the same state as last 
year. That would be dreadful, for he could not go 
abroad again." But by refraining for a while from 
work he recovered his normal condition. It was in 
this same year (1771) that he composed the " portrait " 



A PINCHBECK HERO 257 

or character of Julie de Lespinasse alluded to in a 
former chapter. Admiring, and even enthusiastic, as 
is the tone of this composition generally, it contains 
one or two passages bearing on the estrangement 
which caused him so much distress. 

" You are often inclined to be irritable and un- 
sympathetic, but the love of pleasing is so strong with 
you in general, that you only show these qualities 
to the writer of this portrait. It is true that you 
prove your confidence in his friendship by allowing 
him to see you as you really are, but that very friend- 
ship obliges him to tell you that you thus appear at 
a great disadvantage." 

This is sufficiently plain speaking, and it is much 
to Julie's credit that she never seems to have resented 
it. But for a specimen of downright, pathetic, hopeless 
misunderstanding it would be difficult to equal our 
next citation. 

" I should like you to have the kind of faults which 
make people lovable — the kind, that is, which arise 
from passion, for those, I confess, I like. But un- 
fortunately the failings with which I have to reproach 
you are not of that sort, and perhaps prove (I only 
hint this) that you are scarcely capable of passion." 

Poor d'Alembert ! He really believed that if Julie 
did not love him it was because the faculty for loving 
had somehow been left out of her nature ! And that 
very year, perhaps at that very time, she was shutting 
herself up all day in her room that she might brood 
undisturbed over the letters which reached her twice 
daily from Fontainebleau ; for there Mora (now back 
in France) was staying, as the King's guest. 



258 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

From this brief retrospect, indispensable to the full 
understanding of one count in the indictment against 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, we return to take up 
the thread of the story, and in so doing touch upon the 
mystery surrounding the other. On the 7th of August 
1772 (a Friday, as Julie afterwards, with a shudder 
of superstitious awe, remembered) the Marquis de 
Mora quitted Paris never again to return ; but six 
weeks before that date his betrothed had encountered 
the man whose influence, though as yet she had no 
foreboding of this, was destined to be fatal not only 
to all her hopes of happiness, but to her self-respect 
and good name. From every point of view it behoves 
us carefully to study the character of this man, if per- 
chance we may arrive at understanding the amazing 
fascination which he exercised over a woman so ex- 
ceptional as Julie de Lespinasse. 

Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert was born at 
Montauban, on the nth of November 1743, or just 
eleven years later than Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. 
His father, a provincial noble of small means, was 
also a soldier of some distinction, and he himself, at 
the age of thirteen, began his military career by active 
service in the Seven Years' War. Both here, and after- 
wards in Corsica, he highly distinguished himself, and 
at twenty-five, by merit rather than favour, attained 
the rank of Colonel. Two years later he published 
his " General Essay on Tactics," a work which created 
an enormous — in fact, a European — sensation. Con- 
cerning the technical portions, it is sufficient to say 
that they have obtained the approval of two such 
critics as Frederic of Prussia and the Emperor Napo- 
leon. But for the world in general the really import- 
ant part of Guibert's book was the Introduction or 




LE COMTE 1 BERT 

FI(0\I AN ENGKAVINt; IN THE BIBLIOTHfeQUE NATIONALE AFTER THE PAINTING BY LANCON 



A PINCHBECK HERO 259 

Preliminary Discourse, wherein he by no means con- 
fined himself to strictly professional topics. It was, 
indeed, a fervent plea for the abolition of abuses in 
all departments of State administration, and though, 
doubtless, only formulating opinions then everywhere 
in the air, shows a boldness and independence which 
in those days of despotic authority were really remark- 
able, and call for our respect. 

In Paris the book had an unparalleled success, 
enhanced, perhaps, by the circumstance that for over 
two years it was kept on the Index Expurgatorius 
of the French Government, and could only be read 
in contraband copies imported from Holland. The 
Encyclopedists, always in sympathy with every effort 
towards reform, were naturally the most enthusiastic, 
but the militant nobility were also highly gratified 
by the thought that a member of their own exclusive 
caste had proved himself as able a writer as any 
literary drudge of them all. Guibert, who was now 
sojourning in Paris, straightway became the idol of 
every salon throughout the length and breadth of 
the metropolis. Men, such men as Voltaire and the 
great Frederic, agreed in crediting him with genius, 
and were only uncertain whether it lay most in the 
direction of letters or of arms. Women of the highest 
rank gravely debated the question : " Which would be 
best of the three? — To be M. de Guibert's mother, 
sister, or mistress ? " 

Alas ! his reputation as a leader of men and his 
popularity as a ladies' hero are, at the present day, 
equally incomprehensible. In this last capacity, 
especially, the writer has earnestly endeavoured to 
understand him, in the humble hope of thereby 
coming nearer to the explanation of his power over 



26o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Julie de Lespinasse. But the attempt has been a 
dead failure. No fascinating villain, no rugged in- 
carnation of strength, emerges from the records which 
alone remain to aid us in the task of reconstruction. 
What we behold is a commonplace and rather fatuous 
egotist, with a shrewd eye to the main chance, clever 
enough, but wholly untouched by the divine fire of 
genius, good-natured enough, but incapable of dis- 
interested devotion to any really lofty aim. Beyond 
a doubt, there must have been something more than 
this, or Guibert would never have been worshipped 
as he was by all the women who knew him — even 
those of his own household. But that something 
more has vanished past recall in the dark gulf of 
intervening years. 

The beginning of his acquaintance with Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse dates from a garden fete, held 
on the 2ist of June 1772, at Moulin Joli, the riverside 
villa of the financier, Watelet, already mentioned as a 
friend of d'Alembert's. The impression which she 
made upon him may be gathered from certain passages 
in the glowing encomium composed by him on the 
night of her funeral. 

"She was thirty-eight^ years old when I first met 
her, and her figure was still distinguished and full of 
grace. She was far from beautiful, and moreover dis- 
figured by smallpox. But her plainness had nothing 
repulsive about it even at the first glance, at the 
second you took it as a matter of course, and at the 
third, you had forgotten it." 

Then follow the remarks on her varied charm of 
expression quoted in an earlier chapter. 

^ In reality, thirty-nine. 



A PINCHBECK HERO 261 

Julie, on her side, two or three days after the party 
at Moulin Joli, wrote to Condorcet : 

" I have made M. de Guibert's acquaintance. I like 
him much. There is character in everything he says. 
He is a strong nature and quite above the ordinary." 

A little later : 

" M. de Guibert has been to see me. I still like 
him immensely." 

In the light of subsequent events, these expressions 
are not without significance, but apart from that con- 
sideration they are in no way remarkable, for Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse was prone to enthusiasms, and 
to the use of language which, by modern standards, 
must be called exaggerated. There is indeed every 
reason to believe that she was still wholly absorbed 
by anxiety concerning Mora, and regarded Guibert's 
company as, at most, a pleasant distraction from it. 
The tone of her letters to Condorcet is at this time 
marked by intense depression. 

" I am deeply touched by your sympathy " (she 
writes, about a fortnight after the departure of her 
betrothed), "it will help to console me and to support 
my courage, for I confess I find that it needs much 
courage to live. It would need more still to die. One 
has ties that cause one suffering, but they are precious, 
and one must resign oneself to suffer. ... M. de 
Mora is gone, it makes a great blank for me." 

A month later : 

" You are very kind, and I am very grateful to you. 
I have been very unhappy and am still terribly 
anxious. M. de Mora has left Bagneres for Bayonne 



262 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

in a state which makes me fear the worst. He has his 
physician with him, but this is no security against 
a relapse, and in his present condition that might 
be fatal. He has been bled nine times, and was too 
much exhausted to realise the danger of attempting to 
travel. I don't know when I can have news of him. 
You are the kindest and most sympathetic of men, 
judge what I must feel." 

In the following month : 

" I have had news of M. de Mora. He is con- 
valescent, but the letters take twenty days to corne. 
It is a great effort to him, besides, to write even a 
line or two, and then his attacks [of haemorrhage] are 
constantly recurring. My affection for him is like a 
sword through my heart, but it had to be. There are 
people for whom there is nothing but misfortune. 
What then must one do? Endure one's lot and look 
forward to death as sailors desire the port after tem- 
pest. But, kind Condorcet, you will think that I am 
still more unhappy than I was, and that will grieve you. 
On the contrary, I am much better than I have been 
for a long time. I can reason about my position 
and speak of it, and before I could only feel and 
suffer." 

When this last letter was written Mora had arrived, 
by way of Bagneres and Bayonne, at his father's house 
in Madrid. Here, for a time, his health seemed 
slightly improved, but, on the other hand, he did not 
find home life at all conducive to mental tranquillity. 
The opposition of his family to the projected marriage 
had redoubled in violence, and, though powerless to 
shake his resolution, it harassed him unspeakably. 



A PINCHBECK HERO 0.62, 

Even his correspondence was tampered with,^ or at 
least such was the opinion of Julie de Lespinasse, who 
observed that her letters from Spain were sometimes 
inexplicably delayed, and sometimes lost altogether. 
In ofreat distress she resorted to the assistance of 
d'Alembert. It seems a strange choice to make of a 
confidant, but d'Alembert appears to have been nearly 
as much concerned about the young Spaniard's health 
as was she herself. On Spanish mail days he regularly 
went to the post-office to inquire for letters from Mora, 
and Julie's anxiety to receive them, and her disappoint- 
ment when none arrived, never struck him as in any 
way remarkable ; in fact, he seems in his degree to 
have shared both emotions. Nothing can be more 
certain than that these letters were never given him 
to read, but even this did not arouse his suspicions. 

In the present case, therefore, when Julie, alarmed 
by an unusually protracted silence on the part of 
Mora, implored d'Alembert to write for information 
to the Duke of Villa- Hermosa, the only member of 
the family whom she did not mistrust, he^ at once 
complied, and received a most courteous answer. The 
Duke assured him that his brother-in-law, though still 
very weak, was making satisfactory progress and had 
recently written several letters to Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse. D'Alembert replied that they had not 
come to hand, "and certainly it is not the fault of the 
post at this end, for here none are ever lost. She 
[Mademoiselle de Lespinasse] and other friends of 
M. de Mora have reason to believe that their letters to 
him have had the same fate." He then begs the Duke 

^ At least two fresh attempts were made at arranging a suitable alliance 
for him in his own rank, the lady in each case seconding to the utmost of 
her power the exertions of relations on both sides. 

^ 7th December 1772. 



264 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

to convey to Mora a letter which he encloses. The 
good-natured nobleman was doubtless far from ap- 
proving of the contemplated mesalliance, but he seems 
to have been shocked at the underhand methods em- 
ployed by Mora's other relatives (M. de S^gur thinks 
that for these the Countess de Fuentes and the 
Duchess de Villa- Hermosa were mainly responsible), 
and several times he served as a medium for the safe 
transmission of letters between the betrothed. 

Meanwhile, the Comte de Guibert had become an 
habitu^ of the salo7i in the Rue Bellechasse, and his 
friendship with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse had grown 
closer and more confidential. Extraordinary as it may 
appear, the principal bond between them, at least 
from the lady's point of view, was formed by the 
fact that each of them was in love with another 
person, and that in each case, though from different 
reasons, the path ran far from smoothly. Like many 
conceited men, Guibert enjoyed posing as an homme 
incompris. He had an attachment of some years' 
standing to a lady who did not, in his estimation, love 
him as he deserved to be loved, and his noble soul 
was, in consequence, afflicted with a profound melan- 
choly. So, at least, he persuaded Mademoiselle de 
Lespinasse, who listened to him with sympathy, and, 
though urging him to remain faithful, could not but 
feel that he had been unfortunate in his choice. (The 
lady in question was married, but this detail never 
seems to have been thought worth considering by any 
one of the three.) It did not occur to Julie that there 
was a certain risk in receiving and reciprocating con- 
fidences of so delicate a nature. She was unhappy 
and she found relief in discussing the causes of her 
unhappiness with a sympathetic confidant. She did 



A PINCHBECK HERO 265 

not realise that, all through that anxious winter, Gui- 
bert was becoming more and more necessary to her. 
It was not until they were on the eve of a separation 
that she became conscious of the importance which his 
presence had assumed for her. It was then that she 
wrote him a letter of which she was hereafter to say : 
" I detest, I abhor the fatality which urged me to 
write you that first note." It forms the beginning of 
the famous correspondence always associated with her 
name, and marks her first decisive step on the down- 
ward path, from which it was never more in her power 
to escape. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 

GUI BERT was, entirely to his credit, distinguished 
from the bulk of his countrymen at that date 
by a passion for travelling, which extended not 
merely to foreign cities, but, in a wider sense, to 
foreign countries. Lack of means prevented him 
from indulging this taste to the full, but in 1773 ^^ 
succeeded in achievinor a four months' tour in Ger- 
many and Austria. It was his intention to visit the 
battlefields of the Seven Years' War, and in general 
to study the military organisation of Prussia— both 
objects so intelligent and, from a professional stand- 
point, so meritorious as almost to atone for the 
grandiloquent exaggeration with which he afterwards 
talked of "his journey round the world," and even for 
the entry in his diary on the day of departure — a 
choice specimen of sentimental egotism. 

"May 20th, 1773. — Set out from Paris, impelled 
by curiosity, by my imperious desire to see and to 
know ; yet, at the same time, still more agitated by 
my regrets, heart-wrung by the separation from all the 
objects of my affection,^ depressed at the thought 
of undertaking a long journey alone, after having 
hoped for the company of a friend [the Chevalier 
d'Aguesseau]. Why then did I not stay where I 
was ."* Because temperament is all-powerful, more 
powerful even than inclination." 

^ A euphemistic allusion to the married lady already mentioned. 

266 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 267 

Three days before the date fixed for his departure 
he received that "first letter" which Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse was afterwards so bitterly to regret. 
Some idea of the extraordinary mental condition 
which dictated it can be formed from the extracts 
gfiven below. 

"You are leaving next Tuesday" (it begins), "and 
as I do not know what effect your departure will 
have on me, or whether I shall feel free to write to 
you, or have the wish to do so, I should at least like 
to speak to you once more, and to make sure of 
hearing from you when you reach Strasbourg. . . . 
You are really very kind. I have just re-read your 
letter of this morning . . . but oh! I do not want 
your friendship ; it would harass as well as comfort 
me, and what I need is to rest and to forget you for 
a time. I wish to be honest with you and with 
myself, and in my present state of agitation, I am 
really afraid of not understanding myself. Perhaps 
my remorse is in excess of my wrongdoing ; perhaps 
my alarm is the very thing which would most offend 
the man I love. I have just this moment received a 
letter from him so full of confidence in my affection ! 
. . . O Heaven ! by what magic or what fatality 
have you come to lead me astray ? Why did I not 
die in the month of September^ ? I should have 
died without regret and without self-reproach. Alas ! 
I feel that even now I would willingly die for him. 
There is no sacrifice that I would not make for him, 
but two months ago there would have been no 
sacrifice in the case. I did not love more, but I 
loved better. But he will forgive me ! I had suffered 

1 i.e. the month after Mora's departure. 



268 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

so much ! I was worn out, body and soul, by long 
endurance. This last persecution of stopping our 
letters made me sometimes feel quite out of my mind. 
It was then that I saw you, and then that you 
restored me to life. You gave me once more a 
feeling of pleasure. I do not know for which I was 
most grateful — the thing itself, or your share in it. 

" But, tell me, is this the tone of friendship? Is it 
that of confidence ? What is it that carries me away ? 
Help me to know myself. Help me to recover some 
sense of proportion. My mind is distracted. Is it 
my remorse? Is it my fault? Is it you? Can it be 
your departure ? What is it that harasses me ? I am 
quite worn out. At this moment I have such confi- 
dence in you that I cast away all self-control, yet 
perhaps I shall never speak to you again. Good-bye ; 
I shall see you to-morrow, and shall perhaps feel 
embarrassed at having written to you as I am doing 
to-day." 

The situation revealed in this amazing letter is one 
into which there usually enters a traditional element 
of ridicule. But such is the tragic nature of the 
conditions that that element is here entirely lacking. 
The laughter which we habitually, and not unnaturally, 
bestow upon a lady who, after much protesting of 
fidelity, suddenly changes the object of her affections, 
is silent in the face of the spectacle here presented to 
us — the spectacle of a woman borne headlong, against 
her will, against her conscience, nay, even against her 
heart, by a force which she recognises with anguish as 
maleficent, but is yet wholly powerless to resist. We 
feel like the spectators at a Greek tragedy, watching 
the toils of Fate slowly closing around the destined 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 269 

victim. We turn once more to scrutinise the man 
who — involuntarily, it would appear — had power to 
effect this thing, and, once more, we are at a loss to 
understand in what that power consisted. It does not 
seem that, at this stage of the miserable story, Guibert 
had made any attempt to win the affections of Julie 
de Lespinasse. Knowing as he did that they were 
already bestowed on another, and observing the de- 
votion which she always manifested for that other, 
he would naturally consider any such attempt as use- 
less. Nor does he seem to have been overjoyed by 
the discovery of his mistake. M. de Segur suggests 
that he was almost terrified by the revelation of a 
passion so far exceeding in depth and power anything 
with which his former affaires de coeur had made 
him familiar. That any scruples of morality or 
honour restrained him is, in the light of his subsequent 
conduct, altogether unlikely, and in justice to him we 
must allow that such scruples in such a case would 
have had little weight with most men of his generation. 
He affected to misunderstand this terribly outspoken 
declaration, and replied with some soothing common- 
places concerning kindred souls and the joys of 
friendship. Her response shows a touching eagerness 
to accept a subterfuge healing to her self-respect. 

" If I were young, pretty and attractive, whereas 
I am just the contrary, I should think there was a 
good deal of artifice in your behaviour to me, but, as 
as it is, I am full of gratitude. . . . You come to my 
assistance, you do not wish me to have to reproach 
myself, and to feel the recollection of you a wound to 
my self-respect. You wish me tranquilly to enjoy the 
friendship that you offer me with such kindness. I 



270 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

accept it, it will be a dear possession to me, and a 
consolation above all others." 

Fortified by this fragile pretext she continued, in 
her own phrase, to " overwhelm" Guibert with letters 
during his absence abroad. The feverish interest 
which she displays in everything concerning him, 
the bitterness of her disappointment when, as often 
happens, he is remiss in replying to her letters, and 
most of all her frequent uneasy allusions to Madame de 
Montsauge, the lady supposed for the moment to reign 
in Guibert's heart, show but too plainly the real nature 
of her feeling for him. Yet her affection for Mora, and 
her anxiety regarding his health, seem still unchanged, 
and this extraordinary dualism — continued to the end 
of her life — is the strangest feature of the case. 

For example : "It is the postman who twice a 
week [i.e. the days of the Spanish mail] decides all 
the actions of my life. Yesterday he made reading an 
impossibility to me. I could only think of the letter 
which had not come." Then, almost in the same 
breath: "You promised to write to me from Stras- 
bourg." And again : " Not a word from you since the 
24th of May ? Are you dead, or can you have already 
forgotten that those you have left behind have not 
forgotten jyou ? . . . I had news yesterday [i.e. that 
Mora had relapsed] which overwhelmed me with grief. 
I passed the night in tears, and when I was utterly 
exhausted, and could feel conscious of anything but 
pain, I thought of you, and it seemed to me that if 
you had been here I would have sent you word that 
I was in trouble, and perhaps you would not have re- 
fused to come to me." Again : "His character is all 
that my heart in its fondest wish could desire, but 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 271 

how his health alarms me ! . . . Oh, what must you 
be to have turned my thoughts for so much as a 
moment from the most charming and most perfect of 
human beings ? " 

Of Guibert's part in the correspondence during 
this expedition only two letters have been preserved. 
Both are written from Vienna, towards the close of 
his absence abroad, and have been published by M. 
Charles Henry in his " Lettres Inedites de Mademoi- 
selle de Lespinasse." In both these epistles he is 
careful still to maintain the fiction of "friendship," 
but at the same time shows an anxious desire to 
soothe and conciliate his sensitive correspondent, 
which process he pursues with a well-intentioned 
tactlessness rather astounding in a gentleman a bonnes 
fortunes. 

" I found five letters of yours awaiting me here, yes 
five. You may be sure that I was careful both in count- 
ing and reading them. You will insist upon my con- 
fessing that I had hoped for other letters as well [an 
allusion to Madame de Montsauge]. Alas, yes ! I 
did hope for others, and I found three ! What will 
you say to a feeling which ought to be stronger than 
yours, yet always lags behind yours .-* Ah, no ! don't 
tell me what you think of it, you could only pain me 
by doing so. After all, I have no right to complain, 
she does her best, she is not capable of any stronger 
feeling. . . . Can I expect her to be like me, or like 
you? ... I love your friendship as it is . . . not 
because it flatters me (I cannot understand the happi- 
ness that arises from vanity ^), but because I feel that 
I return it in all its fulness. That being so, why 

^ This is glorious 1 



272 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

did I write to you so seldom during my stay in 
Silesia?" 

He explains that he was always too busy by day 
and too tired at night, and had written to nobody, and 
proceeds, referring to a passage in one of her letters ^ : 
"What an absurd catalogue you have made of all 
these people who take precedence of you ! I swear 
that Madame de M. and you always are the two first 
objects of my thoughts, I could not say to which of 
you I write first. To-day, for example, it is to you. 
Then comes my father, then the Chevalier d'Agues- 
seau. Just see what favouritism I show, in placing the 
Chevalier, my friend from childhood, after you ! " 

In the next letter, which announces his imminent 
return, he gives her the magnanimous assurance : "I 
shall see you before Her,'' and immediately spoils the 
effect by adding : " That, no doubt, is because I come 
first to Paris," Madame de Montsauge being then in 
the country. Then, apparently realising his blunder, 
he tries to patch it up after this fashion : " But if she 
were on my road to Paris, and I thought that you 
were ill or in trouble and needed me, I would only 
stay a minute with her before going straight to you. 
Friendship, as I understand it, at least where you are 
concerned, has claims for me which you do not venture 
sufficiently to estimate." 

On such crumbs of condescending consolation the 
proud and sensitive woman supported existence as 
she could. But when Guibert, late in October 1773, 

^ " How many persons are you more anxious to see again than me ? I 
will give you the catalogue : Madame de M., the Chevalier d'Aguesseau, 
MM. de Bi-oglie, Beauveau, de Rochambeau, de Peze, etc. ; Mesdames de 
Beauveau, de Boufflers, de Rochambeau, de Martonville, etc., and then the 
Chevalier, the Count de Crillon, and last of all me." 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 273 

returned to Paris, having had on the whole a very 
successful tour — which amongst other agreeable in- 
cidents included a highly flattering reception from the 
great Frederic — his feeling for Mademoiselle de Lespin- 
asse seems to have rapidly increased in intensity. Now 
that he was again in her company he became daily 
more and more conscious of her wonderful personal 
charm. We have his own assurance that this charm 
was, for him, in no way impaired by her want of good 
looks, and the question of age seems to have had no 
more weight with him than it had had with Mora. 
He became, in fine, avowedly her lover, but a lover 
of far different fashion from the man whose life was 
slowly ebbing away in distant Madrid, This writer 
has no wish to bear over-hardly upon Guibert in the 
futile desire of clearing at his expense the reputation 
of Julie de Lespinasse. It may even be, as M. de 
Segur conjectures, that it was exactly the earthly 
element in his passion for her, as contrasted with the 
romantic and chivalrous devotion of his rival, which 
endowed him with a power so terrible and so irresist- 
ible. But at the same time it is abundantly clear that 
she not only struggled long before yielding to this 
baser form of temptation, but afterwards made con- 
tinual efforts to rise above it, and that her will was 
in each case borne down by the man's unflinching and 
unscrupulous purpose. Equally manifest is the fact 
that, whereas she contemplated the sacrifice of her 
engagement with Mora, Guibert never for a moment 
relinquished his purpose of marrying another 
woman, and did not even feel bound to abandon 
for a time the lighter love affairs which occupied 
a large share of his existence. 

There is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon 
s 



274 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

this period of Julie's history. To do so would, for 
the present biographer, be scarcely less painful than 
to describe in detail the dishonour of a familiar friend. 
Yet two points we are bound in common justice to 
emphasise : the first, that it is difficult to judge such 
a case by the standard of the present generation ; the 
second, that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was as far as 
possible from resembling the crowd of light-hearted 
sinners who, on every side, surrounded her, and 
suffered agonies of remorse such as few women of her 
entourage would have been capable of feeling on such 
a score. ^ 

It was in February 1774, a date unmistakably 
indicated by more than one reference in her letters, 
that she forfeited, as she says, all right to respect 
herself The inevitable Nemesis was not long in 
coming, but it did not assume the form of public 
exposure and disgrace. Nothing in the whole story 
is more remarkable than the entire absence of any 
suspicion as to the true nature of her relations with 
Guibert. It was not till one of the pair had been dead 
for thirty-three years, and the other for nineteen, that 
the posthumous publication of the " Letters " revealed 
that long-kept secret, to the intense astonishment of 
their few surviving contemporaries. Yet they seem 
to have been constantly together, passing hours alone, 
either in a private box at the Opera, or in Julie's 
rooms in the Rue Bellechasse. That no one in these 
circumstances should have even guessed at the truth 
testifies alike to the high character borne by Mademois- 
elle de Lespinasse, and — in the interests of justice, we 

1 She writes to Guibert : " The crime of a moment has ruined my 
whole life. What does it profit me that I was always virtuous before I 
knew you ? I know that I have sinned against virtue and against myself, 
and I have lost all self-respect." 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY 275 

must add — to the honourable reticence maintained 
by Guibert, a reticence all the more creditable to him 
that it scarcely seems to have been in general among 
his habits/ 

Julie's punishment was to come in more subtle 
fashion, through the man she had wronged in the first 
instance, and in the second through that other man to 
whom she had made a sacrifice so appalling. During 
the early part of that winter Mora's condition had 
been rather more hopeful, but in the fatal month of 
February the haemorrhage, accompanied by an ominous 
cough, recurred with unusual violence. The alarming 
intelligence was communicated by Villa- Hermosa to 
d'Alembert, and by him to Mademoiselle de Lespin- 
asse. He was much alarmed by the agony of terror 
to which it reduced her, but, as usual, failed to draw 
the irresistible inference. "There is no place in 
the world," he innocently writes to the Duke, "where 
M. le Marquis de Mora can be better loved 
than in the little corner of it which we inhabit." 
Alas ! he was far indeed from conjecturing the two- 
fold forces of grief and remorse which gave to the date 
of Mora's seizure — the night of February the loth — a 
significance of unspeakable horror. For on that self- 
same night that Mora received his death-blow he was 
betrayed by the woman he had trusted so entirely. 

From this last attack he never really recovered, 
and to those surrounding him, and even to himself, it 
became clear that the end could not be far removed. 
Meanwhile, d'Alembert, whose solicitude is a remark- 
able testimony to the winning personality of Mora, had 

1 In his " Eloge," written after Julie's death, he speaks of her love for 
Mora in terms which leave not the slightest room for suspecting that he 
had himself been preferred. 



276 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

for some time past been endeavouring to persuade 
the patient and his friends that the air of Madrid and 
the methods of Spanish doctors were largely respon- 
sible for the present state of things, and that the best 
hope lay in removal to the more temperate climate 
of Paris, and in the resources ^ (save the mark !) 
of modern medical science there attainable. In this 
view he was supported by Lorry, a celebrated Parisian 
doctor, who had been called in to Mora during his 
residence in France. The Marquis had at first given 
little heed to their persuasions, probably because he 
felt himself unequal to so long a journey, but now, 
despite his increased weakness, he suddenly decided 
on attempting the transfer to Paris. The real motive 
for this change of plans remained a mystery to the 
world at large, but was only too well understood by 
Julie de Lespinasse. Although far from realising 
the actual state of the case, he had become conscious 
of an undefined something in her letters which had 
not been there before ; some failing in the spontaneous 
fervour which had been wont to respond so entirely 
to his own ; some hint of regret and self-reproach suffi- 
cient to alarm the sensitive instincts of a lover. Yet 
it seems that no thought of investigation, far less of 
vengeance, had any share in dictating his return. 
Suffering and separation, he thought, had deadened 
her feeling for him, but his presence and the warmth 
of his unabated affection would give it new life. And, 
what is more strange, Julie appears to have desired 
his return as much as he. This was partly due to her 
sincere conviction that the best chance for his life lay 

1 In justice to d'Alembert's intelligence it must be admitted that he 
ranks excessive bleeding, practised it appears in Spain to a worse degree 
than in France, among the causes of Mora'-s weakness. 



THE TENTH OF FEBRUARY i^^ 

In removal from Madrid ; but besides this she had 
evidently some confused feeling that such love as his 
might extend to the forgiving of her great offence, 
and save her, even now, from herself and Guibert, 

On the 3rd of May 1774, Mora "tore himself," in 
Julie's own words, "from his family and friends," 
and set out from Madrid accompanied by his Spanish 
physician — an escort of very doubtful utility. He 
travelled by easy stages, and at first bore the fatigue 
better than might have been anticipated, but when 
he had been a week on his way the fatal haemorr- 
hage appeared once more. In his weakened condition 
there seemed scarcely a possibility of his surviving 
this last attack, and Julie, who had doubtless received 
the news from his doctor or one of his servants, 
writes to Guibert in terms which best express the 
amazing dualism of feeling already referred to. 

" Never till now have I truly known despair. I 
feel a degree of terror which deprives me of all 
reason. I wait for Wednesday's^ news. . . . It is 
beyond my strength to realise that he whom I love, 
he who loved me, will perhaps never again hear me 
call upon him, will never again come to my help. 
The thought of me must have made death terrible 
to him ; on the loth he wrote to me * I feel in myself 
the power to make you forget all that you have 
suffered for my sake,' and that same day he was 
laid low by this fatal attack." 

Meanwhile, Mora, tenacious of his purpose, had 
succeeded in dragging himself as far as Bordeaux, 
where he arrived, "almost dead," on the 23rd of 
May. Here, four days later, he passed away, 

^ Mail day. 



2 78 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

having received the last sacraments of that Church 
with which, in his Hfetime, he had been so Httle in 
sympathy. On his dying bed he gathered sufficient 
strength to write once more in these words to the 
woman whom he had loved with such devotion : 

" I was about to have seen you once more, and now 
I must die. What a fearful stroke of Fate ! But you 
once loved me, and the thought of you is still sweet 
to me. It is for your sake that I am dying." 

Thus passes from the life of Julie de Lespinasse 
the one man who, as it seemed, might have made 
that life a perfect whole. To us, indeed, he is, of 
necessity, scarcely more than a shadow, yet through 
the universal testimony of his contemporaries, and 
the little which we know of his own actions, we 
vaguely divine that here was one who had in him 
the possibilities of a great nature. 



CHAPTER XXII 

FOR ONE, DESPAIR ; FOR MANY, HOPE 

THE news of Mora's death was six days in reach- 
ing Paris. Of its immediate effect upon Julie 
de Lespinasse we can only judge by scattered re- 
ferences in letters of a later date. That in the first 
anguish of despair she resolved on taking her own 
life is certain, and will be surprising to no one familiar 
with her passionate and impulsive nature. That Gui- 
bert alone suspected her purpose, and succeeded in 
dissuading her from it, is rendered equally certain by 
the incessant reproaches which, on this very score, she 
afterwards heaped upon him. The sight of her agony 
evidently inspired him with genuine pity, and perhaps 
with some degree of remorse, and in his efforts to 
reconcile her to life he showed a tenderness which 
she was unable to resist. The thought may even, in 
spite of herself, have crossed her mind, that the barrier 
between them was now removed. Perhaps she refers 
to the half-conscious hope thus suggested in these 
words, written after she had come to a better under- 
standing as to the nature of Guibert's feeling towards 
her : 

" I dared to think you might love me as I loved 
you. You must have thought me mad to imagine 
such a thing. I to expect constancy from a man of 
your age endowed with every quality that can recom- 
mend him to all the most charming of women ! " 
279 



28o A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Yet if she sometimes for a moment ventured to 
entertain any thought of consolation, it was presently 
swept away in the torrents of self-reproach which 
overflowed her whole being. Not only had she been 
false to Mora, but she was, in her own estimation, 
responsible for his death. She forgot that the fatal 
journey had been undertaken with the highest medical 
sanction, and that, in any case, it could only slightly 
have hastened the inevitable conclusion. By this 
last consideration, Guibert, who took Bordeaux on the 
way to his father's house at Montauban that summer, 
and at Julie's request made special inquiries into 
the details of Mora's death, vainly endeavoured to 
reassure her. 

"Why will you make bad worse," he writes to her, 
"by imagining that you had any share in his death? 
He had carried the cause of it within him for two 
years, and twice, when in Spain, only just escaped 
with his life. He was dying when he set out on his 
journey. The consul at Bordeaux told me that the 
doctor had declared he would have died all the same 
anywhere." 

Reasonable as was this line of argument, it could 
not prevail against the thought that Mora's anxiety 
on her account (though "he knew not how low I had 
fallen ") had been the determining cause of his journey, 
and that this anxiety had embittered his last moments. 
The sympathy of such friends as Suard and Condorcet, 
who had known, or guessed at, her relations with the 
deceased, brought her no comfort, because she felt 
herself unworthy of it, and in the case of d' Alembert, 
who was genuinely afflicted on his own account, she 
must have experienced the double sting of a double 
deception. Even when the Count de Fuentes, ig- 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 281 

noring, with the courtesy and good feeling of a true 
Spaniard, the bitter family dissensions of which she had 
been the cause, wrote to thank her in most moving 
terms for all her kindness to his beloved son, he only 
suggested the reflection : " Unhappy man, he does not 
know that the death of his son is perhaps due to 
me. 

It must be owned that her letters, filled as they 
were with self-reproach and regret, cannot have been 
particularly agreeable reading to a man so happily 
occupied with himself and his own merits as Guibert. 
He had, besides, other things to endure, as a set-off 
to the gratification of being beloved by the most re- 
markable woman in Paris, and preferred to the man in 
whom many had divined the future ruler of Spain. 
Julie, so tactful, so conciliatory, and so generous in 
her dealings with the world at large, was with him 
all exaction, irritability, and jealousy. She might 
perhaps have forgiven him his pleasing habit of losing 
or damaging borrowed books (though d'Alembert, 
she warns him, is less lenient on this score), but the 
negligence ^ with which he carried her letters loose in 
his pocket, or left them lying about for anyone who 
chose to read, exasperated her beyond all bearing. 
More serious still was the light-hearted fashion in 
which he forgot or broke through appointments ac- 
cording to his own convenience. But all these things 
were as nothing compared with the discovery that 
he had not really broken, as he had assured her he 

1 It has been pointed out to the writer that this does not seem to tally 
with what was previously said of Guibert's discretion. The remark is per- 
fectly just, but it is none the less certain that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, 
in almost every letter, upbraids him with negligence of the kind specified 
in the text. It is certainly almost impossible to understand how the 
secret could, under such conditions, have been so well kept. 



282 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

had done, with Madame de Montsauge. Their corre- 
spondence is a continuous record of quarrelling and 
reconciliation, and we scarcely know over which to 
marvel most — the terrible fascination which, despite 
all disillusionment, still keeps its baleful hold upon 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, or the astounding tact- 
lessness of Guibert, who never seems to have the 
faintest apprehension of what will be the wrong thing 
to say, and, having said it, is always much aggrieved 
at the effect thereby produced. The following extracts 
from a letter ^ written during that absence at his father's 
house above alluded to will give some idea of what, 
in the gallant Colonel's estimation, was a nice way of 
stating unpleasant facts, and at the same time will 
throw light on one of his better qualities, his capacity 
for family affection. 

" When I was at Bordeaux, I saw my little niece, 
my poor sister's daughter. I am very anxious about 
the child's future. She is at present in the care of an 
aunt, who will look after her as long as she can, but 
she is growing old, and her husband is older still. If 
he dies she will have no money for herself, and the 
poor little girl would then be badly off indeed ! 
There would be nothing for it but a convent. 

" That is not all. The little girl has a brother nearly 
twelve years old. He is being miserably taught, as 
is always the case in the provinces. I should like 
to give him a better education, and then put him in 
the army, but I cannot afford it. . . . Then, when I 
arrived at home, I found my father threatened with a 
blow which would mean his ruin " (the resumption of 
his fief by the King). "... Add to this, that I have 

^ 9th September 1774. From the edition of the Comte de Villeneuve- 
Guibert, 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 283 

a mother and two sisters . . . that I have a few debts, 
of no great amount certainly, but still important for 
anyone who is not rich, that living in Paris increases 
them insensibly every year, and that I do not want to 
live anywhere else. . . . Consider all these points 
and you will not be surprised that I am out of spirits. 
The future is full of difficulties and perhaps the only 
way to pay off my debts and be able to help my family 
will be to marry. My father has had some pretty 
good offers made him on my behalf in this part of the 
world. I have refused them, for I would rather kill 
myself than live in the provinces. I cannot find a 
single congenial companion there. You and your 
circle, but especially you yourself, have spoiled me 
for a country life. . . . 

" There is only one person ^ besides yourself who 
keeps me bound to Paris. Is it right that you should 
reproach me because I cannot entirely detach myself 
from a woman whom I have once loved ? Is not the 
case just the same with you, and do you not find room 
in your heart for another ^ beside me ? " 

Julie's reply to this remarkable letter is a marvel 
of dignity and self-control. After assuring him that 
she will use her influence to prevent the resumption 
of his father's land (a promise which she effectually 
redeemed) she continues : 

" I do not oppose your plans for the future. For 
me, the future has no existence, so you may imagine 
that I cannot have much of an opinion as to that of 
other people. Speaking generally, I should say that 
you would be wiser not to marry in the provinces. 

^ Madame de Montsauge. 

^ An allusion to his dead rival, Mora. 



284 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

. . . Paris is the best place in the world for poor 
people to live in. Only bores and fools need have 
money there. . . . What you say of your nephew 
and niece is most interesting and does you honour, 
but shows your old habit of worrying yourself about 
the future. For the present, the children are all 
right. . . . Why should not the girl be happy in a 
convent, especially if no pressure is put upon her in 
the matter ? As for the little boy, there will be much 
less difficulty about a career for him. You know 
better than I do that the teaching at a provincial 
school is just as good, or just as bad, as at a school in 
Paris, and it will make no difference at all as to his 
getting into the army." 

Three weeks later, she thus recurs to the subject 
of his matrimonial projects : 

"You will never guess the occupation to which 
I am devoting myself at present. I want to find a 
wife for one of my friends. I have an idea which 
I hope may be successful. The Archbishop of Tou- 
louse [Lom^nie de Brienne] can be of great service 
to us in arranging the matter. It is a young girl of 
sixteen, who has only a mother and no father ; she 
has a brother. She will have 560 pounds a year on 
her marriage, and will have a home with her mother 
for a long time, because the brother is only a 
child. This girl cannot have less than 26,000 pounds 
(ultimately), and may have more. Would this be to 
your liking? If it is, we will set to work, and there 
is no fear of a rebuff, for the Archbishop is as tactful 
as he is polite. We will talk it all over, and if this 
does not succeed, I know a man who would be very 
glad to have you for his son-in-law, but his daughter 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 285 

is not more than eleven. She is an only child, and 
will be very rich." 

Guibert, in his reply, makes no direct allusion to 
these rather startling suggestions, neither of which, 
it may be observed, was eventually carried into 
practice. He merely comments on the injustice of 
Fate, as exemplified in the case of a friend who, 
though in no special need of money, had just annexed 
a wealthy heiress, and goes on in these words : 

" And I must marry too ! I must. There is no 
help for it ! The Count de Crillon [the friend in 
question] had 650 pounds a year, and I have only 
half that. He was steady, and I am in debt. . . . My 
father has a marriage in view for me. ... I will tell 
you all about it (when we meet, understood), you 
will advise and help me. If I am forced to marry, 
I should prefer you to choose for me." 

When we read this extraordinary interchange of 
ideas we are, for a moment, driven to the conclusion 
that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was at last on the 
way to be cured of her infatuation, that she had 
realised the man's essential paltriness, and, with 
the patient scorn of a higher nature, had turned her 
attention to serving him in the only way which he 
was capable of appreciating. Some such thought was 
certainly half present to her consciousness. Her 
letters about this time are filled to overflowing with 
the expression of her remorse for having been false 
to a better man (as she not obscurely implies) than 
her correspondent, and of her conviction that for her 
all possibility of happiness vanished on the day when 
Mora breathed out his life in the inn at Bordeaux, 



286 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

But with Guibert's return to Paris the old "magic," 
the old " intoxication " (both words are hers), re- 
asserted their power. The question of marriage was, 
for the time being, shelved (probably even Guibert 
did not find it an easy subject for verbal discussion), 
and things went on much as before — unhappily, that 
is, but without any definite rupture. 

But, meanwhile, events had occurred which were 
destined strangely to affect the fortunes of France, 
and Julie de Lespinasse was too near the heart of 
things to be insensible, even in her utmost private 
sorrow, to the momentous changes taking place 
around her. On the loth of May 1774, two or three 
weeks before the day of Mora's death, Louis XV. 
had passed away, little regretted by his subjects, who 
were eagerly looking to the new reign as the inaugur- 
ation of a new era. The young King was known 
to be, roughly speaking, all that his grandfather had 
not been — irreproachable in morals, deeply impressed 
with the responsibilities of his position, sincerely bent 
on promoting the welfare of his subjects. His girl- 
queen was, as yet, beloved for her beauty, her 
winning youthful ways, her graciousness and gaiety. 
All that was best in the nation throbbed with hope 
that now at last old grievances would be swept away, 
old wrongs redressed, and for a time it seemed as if 
this hope might be fulfilled. 

Amid the universal excitement, Julie appears at 
first to have rather inclined to the unpopular part 
of Cassandra. The Abb^ Morellet, writing after the 
Revolution, has recorded how, when returning from 
Versailles on the day following that of the King's 
death, he encountered her driving with some friends, 
and how his eager announcement : " It is all over," 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 287 

was met with this dispiriting comment thrown from 
the carriage window : " My dear abbe, we shall only- 
change for the worse." Commenting on this all too 
accurate prophecy, Morellet makes the sensible re- 
mark that she was always inclined to look on the 
dark side of things, and that such people must some- 
times be in the right. These gloomy forebodings, 
however, due probably to the personal anxieties with 
which she was then distracted, gave way to hope 
when she found that Turgot was to be a member 
of the new Ministry, and at times she almost forgot 
her own troubles in unselfish anticipation of the re- 
forms which he would now have power to effect. 

This remarkable man, one of the purest and 
noblest characters in history, had, at this time, been, 
as she says, for seventeen years her friend. Their in- 
timacy must thus have dated far back into the period 
of her tutelage at St Joseph, and he was amongst 
those who, on the rupture with Madame du Deffand, 
espoused her part, to the extent of renouncing all 
friendship with this last-named lady. By birth, he 
belonged to the legal caste, but being a younger 
son was destined for the Church, and sent to study 
theology at the Sorbonne. It is worth noting that he 
never regretted the years so spent, but esteemed 
the mediaeval institution of "theses" and "dis- 
cussions " an excellent training for the intellect, and 
was wont in after years to say smilingly to his old 
college friend, Morellet : " My dear abbe, it's only 
divinity students like you and me who know how to 
reason correctly ! " But, though of exemplary conduct 
(Morellet, with honest enthusiasm, records that he was 
wont to blush like a girl at the slightest approach to 
licentiousness in conversation), Turgot was an ex- 



288 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

ceedingly bold thinker, and felt within himself a 
growing aversion to the ecclesiastical calling. This 
feeling was incomprehensible to most of his friends, 
who, for their own part, found no difficulty in reconcil- 
ing speculative unorthodoxy with outward conformity, 
and endeavoured to dissuade him from a step which 
would, they said, completely spoil his career. He 
gently answered that they were quite justified in 
doing what their consciences permitted, but that for 
himself it was impossible to go on all his life wearing 
a mask ; and therefore abandoned the Church for his 
father's profession, the Law. In this new vocation 
his talent and industry soon brought him success, and 
in the next ten years he rose from one position to 
another in the ** Magistracy" of Paris. 

1 1 was during this period (1751-1761) that he began 
to frequent the salons of Madame du Deffand, 
Madame Geoffrin, and Madame Helv^tius. His 
acquaintance with this last-named lady dated back 
to his student days at the Sorbonne, when she was 
still Catherine de Ligniville, and lived under the 
wing of her aunt, Madame de Graffigny, the popular 
novelist and playwright. Minette, to use her familiar 
appellation, was one of a family of twenty children, 
and would have been doomed to a "religious" life 
had not Madame de Graffigny come to the rescue. 
The aunt and niece had at first a hard struggle to 
make ends meet, but Madame de Graffigny was 
more successful than most women-writers of that 
time in making literature pay, and, in the end, 
attained a fairly comfortable position. Turgot, who 
was a great admirer of her novels, came often to her 
house in the Rue d'Enfer, not far from the Sorbonne, 
to discuss literature with her, and, incidentally, to play 




TURCOT 

FFiOM THE PAINTING IN THE MUSEE DE VERSAILLES 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 289 

at shuttlecock with Minette, despite the hindrance of 
a scholar's gown. Morellet, who was introduced by 
his friend to the two ladies, saw, as he thought, in 
those games of shuttlecock, and the conversations 
accompanying them, the beginning of a hopeful 
romance ; but apparently it was all on one side, 
for in 1 75 1 Mademoiselle de Ligniville married 
Helv^tius, the wealthy farmer -general and dinner- 
giving Maecenas of the Encyclopedists, and there is 
every reason to believe that she was satisfied with 
her choice. Turgot and she, however, continued 
friends to the last, and when, after twenty years 
of married life, she became a widow he would fain 
have made her his wife, but the memory of her 
dead husband was still supreme in her heart, and 
though she long survived him she would never 
marry again. 

Turgot, on his side, remained single all his life — 
a life consistently devoted to the loftiest and most 
unselfish aims. His passionate desire for social 
amelioration — on which subject, he was, as Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse aptly expresses it, "a fanatic" 
— found comparatively little scope so long as he 
continued to practise law in Paris; but in 1761 he 
was appointed to the Intendancy of Limoges — i.e. 
of three provinces comprised under that name. For 
twelve years he held this post, and during that time, 
by the excellence of his administration, he did all 
that under the existing laws was possible to lighten 
the burdens of the suffering peasantry. When, in 
August 1774, he was appointed Comptroller-General 
of the Finances, it seemed to him, and to his many 
sympathisers, that the opportunity for a radical reform 
— to be effected by introducing modifications into 



290 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

those laws — was at last granted him. In a letter to 
Guibert, Julie de Lespinasse records with something 
like transport what Carlyle calls his " noblest plain- 
ness of speech " to the King, and the King's " noblest 
royal trustfulness," in return. 

"He had made some difficulty about accepting the 
Comptrollership when M. de Maurepas on behalf of 
the King offered it to him. When he went to thank 
the King, the King said to him : ' So, you would rather 
not have been Comptroller-General?' 'Sire,' said 
M. Turgot, * I confess I would rather have had the 
Admiralty, because it is more of a fixed position, 
and I should have been more certain of doing good 
in it. But now I yield, not to the King, but to the 
honest man.' The King took hold of both his hands, 
and said : ' You shall never repent it. ' M. Turgot 
added : * Sire, it is my duty to represent to your 
Majesty the necessity of economy. Your Majesty 
should be the first to set an example in this respect. 
No doubt the Abbe Terray^ has already said the 
same thing to your Majesty.' 'Yes,' said the King, 
*he has. But not as you have said it' You may 
take all this as absolutely certain, for M. Turgot 
never adds a word to the truth. This sympathy on 
the King's part is M. Turgot's great hope, and I 
believe you will share in it." 

Alas ! that hope was soon to be borne down by the 

1 Turgot's predecessor as Comptroller-General. His character may 
be conjectured from the following anecdote. When Maurepas first 
proposed Turgot for the post Louis objected : " But they say he never 
goes to Mass ! " "I don't know how that may be, Sire," answered 
Maurepas, "but the Abbe Terray always went." The honest young 
King admitted that this argument was conclusive, and sent for 
Turgot. 



FOR ONE, DESPAIR; FOR MANY, HOPE 291 

forces of selfishness, ignorance and prejudice — forces 
which, within twenty years' time, were destined to 
plunge alike the nation and its innocent, well-meaning 
sovereign into the most awful cataclysm known to 
modern history. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 

APART from her sympathetic watching of Turgot's 
career, JuHe, during the autumn of 1774, found 
some distraction from her troubles in making ac- 
quaintance with an almost forgotten statesman, who 
by that shrewd observer of politics and politicians. 
Benjamin Disraeli, was reckoned among the "sup- 
pressed characters of English history." Lord Shel- 
burne, for it was he, had relations with some members 
of the Encyclopedic party, chiefly with Morellet, who, 
two years previously, had been a guest at his country 
house in England. It was but natural that, when he 
in his turn visited Paris, he should desire an intro- 
duction to an Encyclopedist so prominent as Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse. During his stay in France 
they saw a great deal of each other, and a warm 
friendship grew up between them. On her side, this 
was no doubt partly a result of the Anglomania which 
she shared with most of the Philosophic party, and 
which blended with her sympathies in politics, 
literature, and philanthropy. 

''He is a man of intellect," she writes to Guibert, 
"he is the leader of the Opposition, he was the friend 
of Sterne, he adores his works. Naturally he attracts 
me strongly." A little later, in reply to some criticism 
of Guibert's : " Yes ; that is the very reason why I 
admire him so much, because he is the leader of the 
Opposition. What a terrible misfortune not to be born 

292 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 293 

under a Government like that ! For my part, weak 
and unhappy creature that I am, if I could have 
another incarnation, I should prefer to be the lowest 
member of the House of Commons rather than the 
King of Prussia himself. Only the glory of Voltaire 
can console me for not being born an Englishwoman. 
. . . Do you know how he [Lord Shelburne] finds re- 
pose from the fatigues of statesmanship? In actions 
of beneficence worthy of a sovereign, in founding 
public establishments for the education of all the 
tenants on his estates, in superintending every detail 
regarding their instruction and well-being. Such is 
the chosen recreation of a man only thirty-fouri 
. . . There is an Englishman worthy to have been 
a friend to that marvel and miracle of the Spanish 
nation (Mora). . . . How widely different from one 
of our charming French courtiers ! Ah ! Mon- 
tesquieu is right ; * the Government makes the 



man. 



Perhaps we may scarcely feel inclined to endorse this 
conception of eighteenth-century England as a home 
for political freedom and enlightened philanthropy. 
Yet the mere fact that, to this most intelligent French- 
woman, an Opposition permitted to have a recognised 
existence, and a landlord who built schools for the 
children of his tenantry, appeared in the light of moral 
miracles, has a significance all its own. It must be 
remembered also that her verdict on the respective 
positions of the two countries in these matters is 
substantially in agreement with that of the most 
competent contemporary authorities on either side of 
the Channel. 

Lord Shelburne, on his side, was scarcely less fas- 
cinated. He "entreated, pressed" her, as she says, 



294 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

to ^ pay him a visit in England ; the change, he thought, 
would restore her health. Julie was deeply flattered, 
and half-tempted by his invitation, but her ingrained 
disHke to travelling, which had increased with increas- 
ing physical weakness, prevented her from accepting 
it. Had she done so, it would have been interesting 
to learn her impressions of the Encyclopedic Utopia. 
Probably they would have been of a fairly favourable 
nature, for her knowledge of the language, and her 
extreme adaptability, no less than the reputation for 
decorum which she had always (and up till very re- 
cently deservedly) enjoyed, would almost certainly 
have made her stay in England a success. 

To Turgot, meanwhile, as to the one person by 
whom the condition of France might be ameliorated, 
her eyes were eagerly turned. Her letters are full of 
affectionate concern for his health, for he suffered from 
frequent and dangerous attacks of gout. 

"I never cease repeating: 'God preserve him!'" 
she writes to Condorcet. . " If he is not able to carry 
out his good purpose, we shall be — not just where 
we were before, but — a thousand times worse off, 
for we shall have lost hope, the only comfort of the 
unfortunate." 

She turns then to the more concrete question of 
Condorcet's own interest and hopes that Turgot will 
do something to increase the salary attaching to his 
post as secretary to the Academy of Sciences. It 
ought, by rights, she says, to amount to 260 pounds, 
an income which would enable " kind Condorcet to 
have soup and meat for his dinner every day, and to 

1 Lord Shelburne was at this time a widower. But there would have 
been no difficulty in providing a chaperon from among the ladies of his 
family. 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 295 

keep a carriage, either for calling on his friends in, or 
for lending to them." 

Even from a twentieth-century point of view, this 
suggestion can scarcely be regarded in the light of a 
"job," for the position of secretary entailed a consider- 
able amount of work, and Condorcet's services to 
science were such as entitled him to some measure of 
substantial recognition. The truly remarkable part 
of the matter is that Julie de Lespinasse, while anxious 
that Condorcet should reap some advantage from pos- 
sessing, literally, a friend at Court, always rejected with 
scorn and repulsion the idea of securing any such 
advantage for herself. To the moral sense of her 
age it would have seemed only lawful and right that 
Turgot should supplement her meagre income by a 
pension from the royal treasury. The ill-natured 
insinuations of enemies, like Horace Walpole and 
Madame du Deffand, on this point, testify far less 
significantly to the general consensus of public opinion 
than does the blundering but well-intentioned action 
of Guibert, who ventured to broach the question of 
a pension for Mademoiselle de Lespinasse to the 
Comptroller-General in person. Turgot, whose con- 
science obliged him, as we have seen, to preach the duty 
of retrenchment to royalty itself, and who in his own 
person had practised it by renouncing a large propor- 
tion of the emoluments attaching to his post, received 
the suggestion coldly, and the Colonel seems to have 
been near to a quarrel with him on that account. He 
admitted as much to Julie de Lespinasse, who forth- 
with wrote in hot haste to rebuke his forwardness on 
her behalf, and hinder it from proceeding further. 

" My dear friend, you are mad ! You are going to 



296 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

say things against M. Turgot, and, that, on my ac- 
count ! You are very kind, and mean well, but you 
are mistaken if you think that poverty or material 
well-being could have any effect on my happiness, 
one way or other." 

Turgot, she says, is only acting honourably, in not 
bestowing public money upon her, and Guibert has 
done very wrong in troubling him, on her account, and 
then resenting his refusal. 

To a man of Turgot's character this sensitive self- 
respect must have been unspeakably grateful, and 
it doubtless increased the confidence with which he 
turned to her for counsel and sympathy amid the 
troubles inevitably besetting his thorny path as 
reformer. The first of these arose in connection with 
a subject which seems perennially destined to be a 
stumbling block for reforming ministers — the question 
of Free Trade in corn. The internal corn trade 
in France was then hampered by many vexatious 
restrictions tending to prevent the sale of grain out- 
side the district in which it was grown. Local 
famines and local "corners" were the natural result, 
and Turgot, realising this, had, during his years of 
Intendantship, succeeded in almost abolishing these re- 
strictions so far as his own district was concerned. One 
of his first actions on becoming Comptroller-General 
was to extend this reform over the whole country by a 
decree enacting that " it shall be free, to all persons what- 
ever, to carry on, as it may seem best to them, their 
trade in corn and flour, to sell and to buy it, in what- 
ever places they choose throughout the kingdom." 

This eminently reasonable and beneficent measure 
did not, however, appeal to all classes of the popula- 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 297 

tion. The merchants, who, during seasons of local 
scarcity, had been able to obtain fancy prices for their 
corn, dreaded the results of open competition with 
other districts not equally afflicted. The dwellers in 
these more favoured localities were, on their part, 
alarmed at the prospect of having their stock of home- 
grown provision diminished in order to supply the 
needs of other provinces. Another factor in the 
problem is suggested by that shrewd young woman, 
Manon Phlipon, who observes that the people had 
hitherto regarded misery as their inevitable portion, 
and that this first dawn of hope had changed their 
sullen acquiescence into a delirious persuasion that 
all things were about at once to become new. If we 
further consider that Turgot, like all reformers, had 
many unscrupulous and implacable enemies, who 
secretly did everything in their power to foment the 
popular agitation, we shall be less at a loss to account 
for the so-called corn riots ^ of 1775. 

They began in the month of April at Dijon, and 
from that point speedily spread to Paris and Versailles. 
"Cheap bread" was the cry of the rioters, and barns, 
warehouses, and bakers' shops were the objects of 
their attack, but as they always burnt and destroyed 
instead of distributing the provisions therein contained 
it was obvious that they did not really aim at lower- 
ing the price of food. Turgot, who clearly understood 
that the disturbance, so far at least as the ringleaders 
were concerned, had nothing genuine about it, but was 
merely designed to bring odium upon his administra- 
tion, was firm in maintaining that no concessions must 
be made to the mob. The young King, well meaning 
as usual, and as usual painfully weak, was at first 

1 Guerre des farines. 



298 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

alarmed into ordering" a reduction in the market price 
of bread, while all the time the spoil of mills and 
provision shops was being wantonly thrown in the 
gutters and trampled underfoot by these champions 
of the poor man's loaf. It took less than twenty-four 
hours to convince poor Louis of his folly, and he sent 
in haste to Turgot, entreating his help in repairing it. 
Turgot came to him at once, and by firm and prompt 
measures of repression soon succeeded in restoring 
tranquillity. 

Every stage of this unhappy business was watched 
by Julie de Lespinasse with the most sympathetic 
anxiety. 

" Our friend has kept his head through the storm " 
(she writes to Condorcet), "his courage and presence of 
mind have not forsaken him ; he has worked day and 
night. ... Is it not heart-breaking to see that, with a 
King who desires to do right, and a minister who has 
no other thought, only evil is done, and many people 
are pleased to have it so ? " 

A few days later : 

" I have been paralysed with terror. ... I was so 
afraid his health would give way. He has indeed 
shown them that he has as much strength of character 
as genius and highmindedness. ... I have not been 
to the country. In the first place, if I had been there, 
I should have come back here during these troubles. 
I did not see M. Turgot, but I had news of him ten 
times a day, and I could not have endured to be with- 
out. And so the month of May has gone by, and 
that was the month when I should have liked to 
have quiet and good air. Besides, I saw that M. 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 299 

d'Alembert did not want to lose me, though he was 
careful not to say so." 

Again : 

" His illness and these last troubles must have 
thrown him much behind with his work. For my 
part, however much it may have cost me,^ I cannot 
reproach myself with having robbed him of a minute. 
I cannot understand how anybody, without absolute 
necessity, can worry a man overwhelmed with 
business." 

The following allusion to Condorcet's " Letters on 
the Corn Trade," published in defence of Turgot soon 
after the riots, shows how, in spite of this admirable 
self-effacement, her counsel was sought and valued by 
the harassed Comptroller- General. 

** It is my fault, kind Condorcet, that the fourth 
and fifth letters were not published a week ago. I 
entreated M. Dupont to wait for the sixth, and 
bring out all three together . . . and M. Turgot 
and M. Dupont were quite convinced by my 
arguments. It would be too long to tell them to 
you here, but you must take my word for it, that, 
without that sixth letter, the others would not make 
the impression or excite the interest that they ought." 

There is surely something noble in this devotion to 
impersonal interests at a time when her whole being 
was crushed beneath a sorrow which brought to its 
climax all the accumulated tragedy of the preceding 

1 A few weeks later she writes to Guibert that Turgot has just been to 
see her. He came at eleven in the morning and stayed till one. They 
had a longer conversation than she has had with him since his accession 
to the ComptroUership, and she finds him friendly and unspoilt as ever. 



300 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

years. For the blow had fallen at last. Two or three 
days before the outbreak of the Guerre des Farines^ a 
contract of marriage was signed between Jacques 
Antoine Hippolyte, Count de Guibert, and Alex- 
andrine Louise Boutinon des Hayes de Courcelles. 
The alliance had been in contemplation nearly two 
years, and in the summer of the previous year 
Guibert had paid a short visit of exploration to the 
chateau of the young lady's father. Mademoiselle de 
Courcelles, who was then only sixteen, and if we may 
trust to her portrait by Greuze a charmingly pretty 
girl, made an entirely pleasing impression upon 
the susceptible Colonel, and she, on her side, was as 
much fascinated by him, as older and more experi- 
enced women were wont to be. The marriage there- 
fore, though, from the material point of view, an 
eminently satisfactory one to Guibert ^ (for Mademois- 
elle de Courcelles was " weel-tochered," no less than 
'* weel-fa'ured "), was not without a redeeming element 
of romance. 

It was precisely this element, however, which he 
was most anxious to conceal from Julie de Les- 
pinasse. The problem of being in love with two or 
more women at the same time presented no difficulties 
to this accomplished amorist. But the task of ex- 
plaining this psychological phenomenon to the ladies 
in question proved sometimes too much even for his 
abilities. We have seen how sedulously he had re- 
presented his matrimonial designs as based entirely 
upon prudence, and irrespective of any woman in 
particular. Through the winter of 1774-5 he had, 

^ About 500 pounds a year seems to have been her immediate dowry, but 
a good deal of gratuitous board and lodging, and expectations for the 
future, must be superadded. 




MADEMOISELLE DE COURCELLES, AFTERWARDS COMTESSE DE GUIBERT 

FROM A PAINTING BY GREUZE 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 301 

in conversation with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, 
allowed the subject so completely to drop that she 
half believed him resolved upon a single life ; while 
all the time negotiations were in progress, and he was 
losing no opportunity of paying his court in person to 
Mademoiselle de Courcelles. Once the betrothal was 
about to be formally announced, however, it became 
plainly impossible any longer to conceal the truth. 
After a clumsy attempt at preparation, which aroused 
an agony of apprehension in his unhappy victim, he 
told her of his approaching marriage, representing it 
as entirely an affaire de convenance, and suppressing the 
fact that he had anything more than a formal acquaint- 
ance with his future bride. 

To the forsaken woman it seemed that now indeed 
she had received her death blow. "If we must cease 
to love, then I must cease to live ! " was the heart- 
broken cry which rose to her lips. For I must em- 
phasise the fact that she regarded Guibert's marriage 
as constituting an impassable barrier between him 
and her. Such a point of view was in her time by 
no means universally recognised, nor was it shared by 
Guibert himself. The " Letters " ^ recently published 
make it plain that — his honeymoon once well over — 
he was anxious to renew their former relations, but en- 
countered a resolution which he found it impossible 
to shake. For the short remainder of her unhappy 
life, Julie de Lespinasse was free from all reproach, 
and we cannot but feel that this determination not to 
injure another woman in some measure expiated her 
former wrongdoing. 

Her attitude towards her unconscious rival was 
indeed conspicuously generous throughout. The 
1 By the Comte de Villeneuve- Guibert. 



302 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

bitterness of her heart overflowed often enough in 
reproaches to Guibert, but of his betrothed she uni- 
formly speaks in terms of respect, and even of kind- 
ness. Once she terrified Guibert beyond measure by 
appearing unexpectedly in his rooms on an evening 
when she knew that he was to receive a visit from 
Mademoiselle de Courcelles and her mother. The 
wretched man vainly implored her to withdraw before 
their arrival. She was determined to see his future 
wife, but the scene which followed relieved him of his 
fears. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse made herself as 
delightful as only she could. The girl was fascinated 
by her charm of manner and the caressing tenderness 
with which she welcomed the jiancde of an old and 
valued friend. Next day, Julie, as if determined to 
be thorough in her great renunciation, wrote to 
Guibert : 

" I thought her charming, and well deserving of 
the interest you feel in her. The manners and ap- 
pearance of her mother are also most pleasing and 
attractive. Yes, you will be happy." 

Guibert was gratified and even touched by this 
magnificent self-abnegation, but he considered that 
it was scarcely maintained with sufficient consistency. 
There was in his opinion a want of good taste about 
such letters of congratulation as that which he re- 
ceived after the formal signing of his marriage 
contract. 

'* And so, the sentence is signed ! God grant it 
may be as decisive for your happiness as for my death ! 
. . . Farewell, may your life be always too full and 
too happy to leave room for the remembrance of an 
unfortunate woman who loved you ! " 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 303 

He did not like to think that he was killing the 
woman whom he professed still to love, but to be told 
it was really very unpleasant. He was so worried, 
or so he said, as to fall quite ill, and wrote, on this 
score, a piteous appeal for forbearance to Julie, who 
replied, more coldly than was her wont in such 
cases : " Marriage will do marvels for you. Your 
wife will insist on your taking care of your health." 
Altogether, his position, as we have some satisfaction 
in reflecting, was far from comfortable, and he must 
have rejoiced when the time cam« to leave Paris for 
his wedding, which was to take place at the Chateau 
de Courcelles.^ 

It was in that loveliest of all seasons, " the marriage 
time of May and June,"^ that the bridal rites were 
celebrated. We would fain have had some account 
of the solemnity, which must certainly have been what 
in modern phrase is known as a "pretty wedding," 
but none such has come down to us. One are left to 
imagine the preliminary calling of banns, with their 
quaint formula : " There is a promise of marriage 
between the high and puissant seigneur Jacques 
Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert, and the high and 
puissant demoiselle Alexandrine Louise Boutinon des 
Hayes de Courcelles, a minor of this parish " ; the 
concourse of neighbours who, on the day before the 
ceremony, flocked to admire the corbeille, or bride- 
groom's gift, set out for show as wedding presents are 
now ; the charming girl-bride, attired, as was the wont 
of fashionable brides, in a much d^collet^ goyfw of silver 
brocade, with unveiled face but hair wreathed with 
the traditional orange blossoms, attended by the two 

^ Near Gien, in the Orleanais. 
^ Emily Bronte. 



304 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

chevaliers de main, who performed the functions of 
the modern bridesmaid ; the wedding Mass ; and the 
banquet which followed it. Yet one valuable memorial 
of the occasion we do possess — an entry in the diary 
of the bridegroom. It deals, however, with subjects 
more interesting to the writer than any external details 
— the emotions and reflections of Guibert himself. 
This is what he writes on the evening of the 
momentous day. 

"June ist, 1775. — My wedding-day, the beginning 
of a new life. Shuddered involuntarily during the 
ceremony. It was my liberty, my whole life that I 
was risking. Never have so many thoughts and 
feelings harassed my soul. Oh, what an abyss, what 
a labyrinth is the heart of man. I am completely 
bewildered by the impulses of mine. But everything 
promises me happiness. I am marrying a young, 
pretty, gentle, susceptible woman. She loves me. 
I feel that she is made to be loved, I love her already." 

Not a thought for the inexperienced child of seven- 
teen, whose happiness must henceforth depend mainly 
on him. No mention of the heartbroken woman who, 
far away in Paris, was realising, as she afterwards 
bitterly wrote, the despair which knows neither 
words nor tears. Equally characteristic is the entry 
which follows. 

"June ist-6th.— The days have passed like a 
dream, and such indeed is my new condition, and the 
love, the sweetness, the frankness, the charm of my 
young wife. Her nature unfolds itself to me day by 
day. I love her, I shall continue to love her. I 
firmly believe that I shall be happy." 



POLITICS AND A PRETTY WEDDING 305 

Certainly Guibert spoke no more than the truth 
when he wrote about this time to JuHe de Lespinasse, 
in words which roused her to an inexphcable fury of 
resentment : "Do not break your heart for me, I 
beseech you. I am not worthy of all that you have 
suffered for my sake." 



CHAPTER XXIV 

TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 

WHEN Mademoiselle de Lesplnasse declared that 
Guibert had signed her sentence of death on 
the same day as his marriage contract she spoke 
no more than the truth. It is extremely unlikely that 
she would, in any circumstances, have lived to be 
old, and the mental suffering of the last few years had, 
of course, gravely affected her always fragile health. 
But this final blow — she survived it barely a twelve- 
month — must certainly have hastened the end. In the 
bitterness of her heart she had likened this marriage 
to a violent operation,^ which must either cure or kill 
her, and at times a wild hope seems to have crossed 
her mind that the first alternative might ensue. 

"So often it seems to me that scarcely anything 
more is needed to deliver me from the misfortune of 
loving you," she writes, "and then I feel almost 
ashamed of having made you my principal interest in 
life. But more often I feel myself bound and chained 
on all sides, so that not a movement is possible to me, 
and then death seems my only refuge from you." 

When the marriage is accomplished, she expresses 
herself in still stronger terms. 

" Your marriage has brought me a thorough under- 
standing of your character, and has closed my heart 

1 In order to realise the force of this simile, we must imagine ourselves 
back in the days when chloroform, antiseptic dressings, and X-rays were 
unknown, and when surgical operations were still regarded with an awe 
undiminished by excessive familiarity. 

306 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 307 

against you for ever. There was a time when I would 
rather have seen you unhappy than contemptible. 
That time is over. . . . No doubt it will cost you 
a little to be no longer the first and only object of 
a restless, impassioned nature, which brings, if not 
interest, at least excitement into your life. ... I un- 
derstand what you are at last. I see that you have 
degraded yourself for 500 pounds a year. I see that 
you did not mind reducing me to despair, and that 
you only looked on me as a makeshift till your 
marriage was arranged." 

Had her physical condition been more favourable 
she might, perhaps, even now, have succeeded in living 
down the past. But she was too weak, and the poison 
had sunk too deeply into her nature. For years past 
she had suffered from insomnia, but now sleep seemed 
banished for ever. If, from mere exhaustion, she lost 
consciousness for a few minutes, she wakened again 
with a start to the recollection that Guibert had for- 
saken her. Her frail body was repeatedly shaken by 
convulsions of terrible violence, the effect, as she says, 
"of despair." 

" M. d'Alembert was frightened," she says of one 
such attack, "and I had not enough presence of mind 
left to reassure him. His anxiety wrung my heart 
and I burst into tears. I could not speak, and he 
says that in my distraction I twice repeated : ' I am 
dying. Leave me alone.' At these words he was 
much upset, he shed tears and wanted to go and fetch 
my friends." 

With his usual inconceivable tactlessness, poor 
d'Alembert regretted the absence of Guibert. ''He 
could have consoled you. You have been more un- 



3o8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

happy than ever since he left Paris." ^ The name had 
a tonic effect. " I felt that I must control myself," 
she proceeds, "so as not to break this excellent 
man's heart. I made an effort, and told him that I 
had had an attack of nerves in addition to my usual 
pain, and in fact, one hand and arm were all twisted 
and bent. I took a sedative ; he had sent for a 
doctor ; to escape having to see him, I collected all 
the strength and reason that were left to me, and 
shut myself up in my room." 

It would even seem that the balance of her mind 
had been disturbed by excessive suffering, for she 
found her principal consolation in holding converse, 
by word and letter, with the generous spirit which 
over a year before had quitted this world for ever. 
She had no clear belief in another life, no steadfast 
hope of future reunion. Once, indeed,^ she piteously 
regrets that she is not, like a new-made widow of her 
acquaintance, supported by "this chimera." But 
imagination sometimes supplied the part of faith, 
and Mora then seemed again living and at her side. 

"I see him," she writes to Guibert, "he lives, he 
breathes for me, he hears me. . . . You are not 
more real to me than M. de Mora has been for an 
hour past. Oh, divine being, he has pardoned nie, 
he loved me." 

It must not, however, be supposed that her in- 
tellectual powers were, in ordinary matters, at all 
impaired. On the contrary, it seems as if her per- 
ception had never been quicker or her judgment saner 
than during this last agonising year. That she made 

'^ i.e. to be married. 

^ " Ah, if I could have the same chimera as Madame de Muy ! I 
should think I had recovered my happiness. She is sure that she will 
see M. de Muy again. What a rock of consolation for a desolate soul ! " 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 309 

continual efforts to shake off the incubus which was 
crushing her, and attain to a healthier frame of mind, 
is plainly shown by the energy with which, despite 
great bodily weakness, she at this time threw herself 
into external activities of every kind. Her eager 
interest in the Guerre des Famines has already been 
noticed, and in the letters to Guibert she continually 
alludes to other distractions, social and intellectual no 
less than political. 

" I have laid down a rule for myself," she says, 
"to which I have been tolerably faithful, and which 
answers well enough. I lead a more social life. I 
am always surrounded by people who love and 
value me, though not because I deserve it. . . . 
They rescue me, so to speak, from my grief, by never 
leaving me a moment to myself." And again : " I am 
going to use all the strength I have left me, to make 
the time hang less heavily. This afternoon, I have 
already engaged myself for five or six things which 
are all more than indifferent to me, but all in the 
company of people who care for me a little, and 
that will give me courage. To-morrow, I am going 
to Auteuil,^ on Friday to Passy, to hear that famous 
prima donna who was here last year, and who, they 
say, has such a lovely voice, and is at the same 
time such a perfect fool. That is a pleasure I could 
have enjoyed, if my mind had been more tranquil." 

In the same letter she speaks of Turgot and 
Malesherbes (now also a minister), of their schemes 
for reform, and the confidence which they both repose 
in her, adding pathetically: "But this may look like 
boasting, and there is no great pleasure in vanity, 
when one is dying of sorrow." 

^ Probably to visit the Comtesse de Boufflers. 



3IO A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Yet the very fact that she felt irresistibly impelled 
to render an account of every occupation and every 
phase of feeling, to the man whom she now professed 
(and perhaps truly) to despise, shows but too plainly 
how far he was from having lost his hold upon her. 
The habit of turning to him for sympathy was so 
deeply rooted that, in her weakened condition, she 
was powerless to eradicate it. "I have seen and 
heard so many things since your departure," she 
says, "and I kept saying to myself: 'All this would 
be full of life and interest for me, if I could share it 
with him, but since I must hold no communication 
with him, it is not worth the trouble of listening.'" 
She was unshaken in her resolution that they must 
not meet again as lovers — a resolution which Guibert, 
being just then, as became a newly married man, in 
a momentary paroxysm of virtue, highly applauded. 
But to abandon the idea of meeting again as friends 
was a renunciation totally beyond her power. 

As a friend, therefore, she set herself to serve 
Guibert. An opportunity of doing so lay ready to 
her hand, provided by the gentleman in question, 
who seemed to think, and, as the event proved, not 
altogether wrongly, that the kindest thing he could 
do for her (as well as for himself) was to supply her 
with an occupation which had his interest for object. 
The literary ambitions of Guibert had been naturally 
raised to a high pitch by the extraordinary success of 
his Essay on Tactics, and were by no means limited 
to military subjects. He had already written one 
tragedy, of which we shall presently hear more, and 
was now at work upon a second. But, like a true 
Frenchman, he felt that, until he had obtained the 
benediction of the national high court of letters, some- 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 311 

thing was lacking to his fame. For at least a twelve- 
month past he had had upon the stocks an essay in 
praise of Catinat, the celebrated general of Louis 
XIV., that being the subject fixed for the Academy- 
competition of 1775. Julie de Lespinasse had long 
been in his confidence with regard to this project, and 
had promised him every assistance in carrying it out 
— no empty promise from a person who was commonly 
reputed to have the making of Academicians in her 
hands,^ and might naturally be supposed to possess 
some influence in such a minor matter as the award- 
ing of a prize. The " eulogium " was completed about 
the time of Guibert's marriage, and almost his first 
communication with Julie after that event was for 
the purpose of enclosing the precious MS. The pro- 
ceeding scarcely strikes one as being distinguished 
by delicacy, but the effect seems to have been rather 
beneficial than otherwise. Feeling the demand made 
upon her magnanimity, she determined to respond to 
it worthily ; and besides, the tension of her feelings 
found relief in the task, to her always a congenial one, 
of literary criticism. 

Her judgment on "Catinat" is indeed remarkable, 
as her judgments on literature always are, for justice 
and frankness. At this distance of time her estimate 
of Guibert's abilities certainly does appear an ex- 
travagantly high one, but M. de S^gur has pointed 
out that in this respect she fell far short of the bulk 
of her contemporaries, and, so far from being misled 
by partiality, was almost the only person who then 
realised, or at least endeavoured to correct, the literary 
deficiencies of this brilliant popular idol. She com- 

^ She herself admits to having, by her zealous canvassing, procured this 
distinction for the Chevalier de Chastellux. 



312 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

pares his eulogium with that of La Harpe^ which 
had been likewise confided to her by the author — 
the only one of the other fourteen competitors who 
seemed to her at all formidable. She observes, with 
much apparent justice, that Guibert's technical know- 
ledge gives him a great advantage so far as regards 
the purely military aspect of the theme. In point of 
style, however, La Harpe is most approved by her 
of the two. Guibert, she says, does not always write 
clearly, and uses expressions which are either eccentric 
or too familiar, but, for all that, he has more power and 
more inspiration than his rival, and, on the whole, he 
seems to her most worthy of the prize. 

Yet, despite all her tactful wirepulling, the contest 
between these rival litterateurs (of whom one is now 
barely remembered, and the other, save for his 
sasociation with herself, wholly forgotten) was not 
decided as she hoped. When Saint Lambert, one of 
the Academicians on whose support she had counted, 
announced to her that he preferred La Harpe's essay, 
and must vote for it, she is said to have burst into 
tears. When the fatal decision had been arrived at, 
and she learnt that the first prize had been awarded 
to La Harpe, and that Guibert had only an honourable 
mention, and was not alone even in that dubious con- 
solation, her resentment broke hotly forth. 

"If Voltaire had competed and they had given you 
the honourable mention, it would have been all right. 
But for you to come after M. de la Harpe, and 
to be bracketed with a young man of twenty, revolts 

■^ In view of a recent controversy the following rebuke written by her to 
Guibert is worth notice : — "You must call him M. de La Harpe, and not 
simply la Harpe. That is an honour only due to men like Racine, 
Voltaire, etc., and must not be conferred on a litterateur of our own day." 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 313 

me to a degree which I cannot express, and have been 
unable to conceal. It hurts my pride, and makes me 
unjust, for I feel almost ready to hate the man ^ who 
has been preferred to you." 

Madame Roland, then Mademoiselle Phlipon, 
chanced this particular year to be present at the 
grand assembly held annually at the Louvre ^ by the 
Academy, on St Louis' Day (25th August), and has 
left us a vivid account of the proceedings. They 
began with a musical Mass, chanted by opera singers, 
in what was known as the Academy Chapel. The 
sermon, as was usual on this day, took the form of a 
panegyric on the sainted king, but the preacher, a 
certain Abbe de Besflas, with leanings to the philo- 
sophic party, obtained a sticces de scandale by intro- 
ducing sundry sly hits at monarchical government as 
understood in France in the eighteenth century. After 
a morning thus spent, the audience separated, pre- 
sumably for dinner, reassembling in the afternoon 
for the reading of the prize essay, and the delivery 
of d'Alembert's yearly address. Manon considered 
La Harpe's production excellent, but the secretary's 
witty and eloquent oration, though yearly looked 
forward to in Paris as a social event of the first 
importance, was to her rather a disappointment, for 
the speaker's unfortunate voice and face prevented 
her from enjoying his periods. The audience was ex- 
tremely brilliant, comprising all the fashionable ^lite 
of both sexes. Frenchwomen, in those days, took 

^ Yet this resentment did not prevent her from promoting the election 
of La Harpe, of whose writings she generally speaks with approval, to 
the Academy in the following year. 

2 What is now the Institute was then, as has been already remarked, 
the College des Quatre Nations. 



314 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

a keen interest in the Academy and, considering the 
prejudices of the time, it cannot be alleged that the 
Academy was ungenerous in its attitude towards them. 
To say nothing of the enormous influence exercised 
by such ladies as Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and 
Madame de Lambert in the election of members, 
women were allowed to take part in the literary com- 
petitions, and not infrequently did so, though I do 
not know that any lady had as yet obtained a prize. 
Nor was this all, for, if we are to believe that rather 
doubtful authority, Madame de Genlis, d'Alembert 
was at this time revolving in his mind the possibility 
of an innovation which, after a hundred and forty 
years still remains to be accomplished — the admission, 
namely, of women within the sacred circle of the 
" Immortals." According to her, he designed to 
propose the creation of four supplementary places, 
for ladies only, and had already fixed upon the first 
occupants thereof. She, Madame de Genlis, was to 
hold the highest rank among them ; the other three 
were to be Madame de Montesson, a lady who had 
written plays of sorts, and made a great marriage, 
Madame d'Houdetot, beloved of Rousseau, and author 
of some exceedingly licentious poems, and Madame 
d'Angivillier, the mistress of a literary salon. 

St Louis' Day was altogether a notable epoch in 
the fashionable Parisian calendar, for it marked yet 
another fixture of high import — the opening of the 
triennial exhibition held by the Royal Academy of 
Painting and Sculpture. This function, which dated 
back to the reign of Louis XIV., took place likewise 
at the Louvre. The room set apart for this purpose, 
which was situated not far from the Gallery of Apollo, 
was known as the Salon^ a name ever since inseparably 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 315 

attached to similar exhibitions in Paris. During the 
ten years spent by Mademoiselle de Lespinasse under 
Madame du Deffand's roof, the Salon had, through the 
influence of Greuze, sustained an appreciable part in 
the new propaganda of sympathy for the less favoured 
classes of society. His pictures of peasant life, im- 
possible as they are, in their prettiness, sentimentality, 
and refinement, had yet a humanising effect. His 
" Father of a Family reading the Bible to his Children," 
a very Frenchified version of **The Cottar's Saturday 
Night," which was exhibited at the Salon of 1755, 
created a ^^ri^ct furore, and the popular enthusiasm 
continued steadily to rise, till it reached its climax on 
the appearance, in 1761, of his "Village Bride." ^ 

By 1775, however, the cult of "sensibility" was, 
owing mainly to the powerful agency of Rousseau, 
pretty firmly established, and visitors to the Salon 
had leisure for the discussion of exhibits distino-uished 
by no particular moral purpose. Among the most 
popular pictures of the year we may mention " Scenes 
in the Seraglio," by Vanloo ; two landscapes by Vernet, 
and the portraits of Louis XVI. and of Gluck, by 
Duplessis. In the department of sculpture, much 
attention was awarded to the busts of Turgot and of 
Sophie Arnould (as Iphigenie) by Houdon. 

Julie de Lespinasse, as became a leader of society, 
did not fail to visit the Salon within two or three days 
of its opening. She was anxious that Guibert should 
make one of her party on the occasion ; for Guibert, 
with his wife and her parents, was now once more in 
Paris. The first week after his marriage had been 
passed at Courcelles (honeymoon trips, though not 
quite unknown, were far from being an established 
* Both these pictures can now be seen in the Louvre. 



3i6 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

fashion), but he had then been obliged by military 
duty to leave his young bride for a while. NoWj how- 
ever, he had obtained leave of absence, and was in 
Paris on business connected with a play of his writing 
already alluded to. That he did not accept Julie's 
invitation may have been due either to the claims of 
this business or to the knowledge that his wife and 
her mother had fixed on the same day for visiting the 
Salon. Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, while wander- 
ing with her friends from picture to picture, caught 
sight of the young girl, and at once approached her 
with the utmost courtesy. 

" Believe me or not, as you please," she writes, with 
a touch of pathetic humour, to Guibert, "but it is a 
fact that I have spent a long time to-day with your 
wife.^ I went up to her and talked to her about her 
health, and her pursuits, and about all the pictures, 
and I will venture to say you will be told I am very 
nice, and won't believe a word of it. Do you realise 
what I am growing into, and the light in which you 
must accustom yourself to regard me ? I am really 
good enough to be Grandison's wife or sister. I am 
growing so perfect that it frightens me. I believe I 
am like the swan, who sings best when he is dying. 
Well, even that is something gained. You will say 
• What a pity she died just now ! ' " 

Guibert, meanwhile, was absorbed in an under- 
taking which promised to indemnify him for his 
academical disappointment, the representation of his 
tragedy, Le Conndtable de Bourbon, before the Court at 
Versailles. The piece in question, founded upon the 
well-known story of Bourbon's revolt against Francis 

1 Madame, votre femme. This more ceremonious form is of course 
untranslatable. 




o 



O 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 317 

the First, is pronounced by so competent an authority 
i as the Marquis de Segur to possess a certain amount 
: of merit. The present writer must confess to finding 
] it very poor stuff indeed. But it was highly admired 
; by Guibert's contemporaries, and even Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse, fastidious critic though she was, on 
the whole endorsed the popular verdict — with this 
reservation, that she did not consider Le Conndtable 
adapted to the stage. The correctness of her judg- 
ment was sufficiently demonstrated by results. So 
long as Guibert contented himself with reading his 
play aloud to fashionable audiences in one great house 
after another it had a tremendous success. Its fame 
even reached the ears of the young Queen ; Guibert 
was honoured with a royal command to give a read- 
ing at Versailles, and Marie Antoinette, charmed by 
the reading and the reader, and also, it is said, by the 
young Comtesse de Guibert, determined, in her im- 
pulsive fashion, to have the play acted in honour of 
an approaching marriage in the royal family. 

The author was, naturally enough, intoxicated by so 
high a distinction. But Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, 
though deeply sympathetic, was unable to disguise her 
fears for the result. She was so nervous that she could 
not make up her mind to use the ticket for the per- 
formance sent her by Guibert. 

'* No, I shall not go," she writes. ..." I shall take 
the keenest interest in your success. ... At five 
o'clock, when the Conndtable begins, I shall imitate a 
prophet, whose name I forget,^ who held his arms raised 
to heaven, while Joshua fought." 

* Forgetfulness on such a point seems strange to those nurtured in 
the Protestant tradition, but similar instances occur frequently amongst 
even the most highly educated Frenchmen. 



31 8 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

On the 20th of August the piece was produced, re- 
gardless of expense, the actors being drawn from the 
staff of the Comedie Frangaise, while the military music 
performed between the acts was specially composed 
by the royal capellmeister. The audience included, of 
course, all the most assiduous habituds of the Court, 
but also many persons holding a much less dignified 
position. The habitual mingling of all social ranks 
and degrees within the royal precincts is, indeed, a 
most curious feature of an absolute, as contrasted with 
a constitutional, monarchy. Presentation at Court was 
a privilege fenced round by all manner of restrictions 
and observances. But everybody, not absolutely in 
rags, had the right, whether presented or not, of using 
the park at Versailles as a public promenade.^ Not 
only so, but they could enter the palace at will, and 
wander, almost unchecked, over the stately halls and 
staircases, and even press their way, as spectators, to j 
the apartment where royalty was consuming its meals. 
It is highly improbable, for example, that Mademoi- 
selle de Lespinasse had been presented. Her birth 
would certainly have been an obstacle, and it does not 
appear that she ever came personally into contact 
with any of the royal family. Yet in her letters she 
repeatedly speaks of driving, in the carriage of some 
friend or other, to Versailles. 

To those persons of humbler position who, on the 
strength of acquaintanceship with Guibert or otherwise, 
had obtained tickets for the Constable, the spectacle 
presented by the auditorium must have seemed deserv- 
ing of, at least, as much attention as that upon the 

^ The royal family had not so much as a flower garden for its own 
private enjoyment. Hence Marie Antoinette's passion for the more re- 
tired Petit Trianon. 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 319 

stage. Public curiosity is always strongly excited by 
the inauguration of a new reign, and in this case the 
changes resulting therefrom had been of an unusually 
marked description. Under the genial sway of Marie 
Antoinette, the French Court, released from the severe 
discipline of etiquette enforced by previous sovereigns, 
had been, says Taine, transformed into the brightest 
and gayest of salons} So far as dress, indeed, was 
concerned that change to a more natural and more 
becoming fashion generally associated with the name of 
the ill-fated Queen, and familiar to us from the graceful 
portraits of Madame Vigee Lebrun, had not yet set in. 
Wasp waists, portentous crinolines, and what Made- 
moiselle de Lespinasse calls "pagoda" coiffures, were 
still almost universal. In fact, these last erections had 
now attained to that highest pitch of absurdity which 
preceded their downfall, and landscapes, gardens, and 
"sentimental" scenes (the last produced with the assist- 
ance of tiny figures in cardboard) might be admired upon 
the heads of ladies aspiring to lead the van of fashion.^ 
As regards the relaxation of the old stringent 
etiquette, however, it was sufficiently demonstrated 
by one significant detail. It had formerly been an 
inviolable law that theatrical performances at Court 
must be received in icy silence ; applause being con- 
sidered an infringement of the respect due to royalty. 
Marie Antoinette, refusing to be bound by this rule, 
applauded, in impulsive girlish fashion, the passages 
which took her fancy, and her example had, naturally, 

* The change to "simplicity " dates, roughly, from 1780. 

* The classical instance is the " Coiffure k La Belle Poule," which, 
however, dates only from 1778. It was so called from the name of a 
famous man-of-war, and represented a ship in full sail, with guns and 
sailors complete. This was accomplished by arranging the hair over 
a frame made in the requisite shape. 



320 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

many imitators. Guibert and his supporters were, of 
course, highly flattered, but they could not disguise 
from themselves that, despite this mark of favour, the 
play was by no means an unmitigated success. The 
King was far from sharing the enthusiasm of his 
consort. Much to his honour, he had been deeply 
impressed by Turgot's admonitions on the necessity of 
retrenchment, and, though he could not bear to oppose 
any wish of the Queen's, the lavish expenditure with 
which the Conndtable was staged caused him real 
distress. The theme, besides, of the piece, the treason 
of a French general against a French sovereign, 
struck him, not unreasonably, as ill suited for a Court 
performance. To crown all, the Royal House of 
Savoy, to which belonged the bridegroom in whose 
honour the spectacle had been intended, was repre- 
sented as having played an unworthy part in inducing 
the Constable's defection. For all these reasons 
Louis did not join in the applause, but looked on with 
an expression of something approaching to sullenness 
on his good-natured though apathetic countenance, 
and it is needless to say that a large portion of the 
audience was emboldened to hint their disapproval 
in similar fashion. 

From a purely artistic point of view the result was 
very much as Mademoiselle de Lespinasse had fore- 
seen. The Constable proved a difficult play to act, 
and Lekain, who appeared in the title role, gave 
but a feeble interpretation of Guibert's hero — though 
he had the grace to apologise for his lukewarmness 
on the score of indisposition. 

Meanwhile, Julie, installed on a sofa in the room 
of a sick friend ^ who had desired her company, kept 
' Madame de Saint Chamans. 




MARIE ANTOINETTE 

FROM A BUST 



TWO LITERARY ENTERPRISES 321 

repeating, as she says, the question of Bluebeard's 

imprudent wife : " Sister Anne, sister Anne, do you 

I see anyone coming ? " The " anyone " in this case 

was d'Alembert, who had been to the performance, 

and who was to bring her news of its good or ill 

success before she could attempt to sleep. About 

midnight he appeared, and, if we are to believe her 

account to Guibert, his version of what had occurred 

was entirely coiileur de rose. " The success was so 

great that all rules were broken through. The 

' splendid scene in the third act was applauded." 

That this optimistic view was only assumed out 

of consideration for the author is plainly shown by 

I the earnestness with which she afterwards endeavoured 

to dissuade him from having his piece acted a second 

, time, and for a wider public. He would not be ad- 

I vised, however, and the undertaking proved — as she 

j had foretold — a dead failure. To do him justice, 

he took this bitter lesson in good part, and though 

he wrote two other plays never attempted to have 

either of them produced upon the stage. 



CHAPTER XXV 

REQUIESCAT 

TT was once a theory in general acceptation, if not 
■'■ by physiologists, yet certainly by novelists, that dis- 
appointed lovers, especially where belonging to the 
weaker sex, almost invariably died of consumption. 
The death of Julie de Lespinasse may perhaps be 
regarded as a confirmation of this remarkable 
empirical law. For at least four years she had 
certainly been afflicted with an almost perpetual and 
very wearing cough, not supposed at first to be 
actually dangerous, but afterwards giving ground for 
much apprehension ; yet so vague is the language 
used by herself and her friends that we are left in 
doubt whether lung disease was the immediate cause 
of her death. It would seem that she rather suc- 
cumbed to a complication of disorders, most of them 
of long standing, against which she had now lost the 
will and courage to struggle. The agonising nervous 
affections from which she suffered have already been 
noticed. She was besides liable to terrible fits of 
suffocation, following on convulsions of coughing, 
and bringing her, as she said, to the very verge of 
death. 

"The terror which it caused my maid made me 
think that death must indeed be a fearful thing," 
she writes of one such attack. " She looked horror- 
struck, and as soon as I was able to speak I asked 
her what was wrong. She could only answer : ' I 

322 



REQUIESCAT 2,'^^ 

thought you were going to die,' for she is too much 
accustomed to see me suffering, to be alarmed merely 
by that." 

We constantly hear moreover of severe internal 
troubles, concerning which it is proper to mention 
that she expresses herself with a degree of reserve 
less certainly than is now usual, yet very rare in 
Frenchwomen of her generation. To all this we 
must add perpetual fever and sleeplessness, and the 
effects of that deadly drug to which she had, more 
and more frequently, recourse. And now that all 
hope and motive in life seemed withdrawn from 
her there ensued an ever-increasing weakness and an 
emaciation by which her friends were in the highest 
degree alarmed. Naturally, they urged upon her the 
necessity of seeking medical advice, but to this she 
was exceedingly averse — and, as it appears to us, 
with good reason. It has been already observed that 
the recognised treatment of consumptive suspects, 
amongst whom she must probably be numbered, had 
two distinctive features. Diet (i.e. semi-starvation) 
was one of these ; and Julie, hitherto so indifferent 
on the score of good living,^ had begun at times to 
feel that abnormal craving for food which seems to 
be Nature's last desperate attempt to repair the 
strength wasted by disease. Bleeding was the other ; 
and here she had fresh in memory the example of 
Mora, who during one attack of haemorrhage was bled 

1 " Just fancy that the keenest interest of my day has been an excellent 
dinner, which has left me some remorse for having shown so much moral 
weakness and so much physical capacity. You do not know the pleasure 
of feeling a passion for your food. I assure you that I have been feeling 
it for the last twelve or fifteen days, and the doctors, in their ignorant 
cruelty, declare that it is a bad symptom for my chest. If I could only 
soothe my cough, I should not trouble myself about their prophecies.^*. 



3^4 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

nine times, and in his intervals of apparent conval- 
escence was still subjected to the same kind of 
treatment as a precautionary measure ! It must be 
conceded that the Spanish physicians, who were 
mainly responsible in this case, were more thorough 
in their devotion to phlebotomy than their colleagues 
beyond the Pyrenees, but the difference was emphatic- 
ally not of kind but of degree. On one occasion 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse herself was bled twice 
from the foot as a remedy for earache (!), and in a 
letter to her brother, Abel, she recommends the 
surgeon ^ whom she generally employs for the purpose 
of bloodletting, much as people nowadays recommend 
a favourite dentist. Yet plainly she had not unlimited 
faith in this method of treatment, and repeatedly 
speaks of trying to avoid bleeding if possible, by 
using more harmless means, such as the warm 
bath. 

Since such were her feelings it was only natural 
that she should shrink from submitting to a regular 
course of treatment, yet by the agonised entreaties 
of her friends she was at last prevailed upon to con- 
sult Bordeu, one of the most famous physicians of 
the day, and, as was noted in a former chapter, an 
enthusiastic advocate of the starving system. To do 
him justice, his verdict on her case seems to have 
been neither inhuman nor unintelligent. It was really 
her mental condition which was in fault, he said, and 
if that could be ameliorated she might recover, but, 
otherwise there was little hope, and it does not 

1 He only charges half-a-crown a time, and is quite good enough, in 
her opinion ; but she shrewdly suggests that perhaps Abel's wife (who is 
out of sorts) will prefer a surgeon of more reputation at a fee of five 
shillings. 



REQUIESCAT ^'^5 

appear that he insisted upon remedies which he 
plainly enough saw to be useless. He did not even 
suggest that final and often marvellously successful 
experiment, change of air and scene. Such a pre- 
scription would indeed have been to no purpose. 
Julie de Lespinasse was as ingrained a town dweller 
as Samuel Johnson himself, and in her life there was 
not even a journey to the Hebrides, or a "jaunt" to 
Lichfield. In all the years that she lived in the 
metropolis, she never quitted it for more than a visit 
of a few days to some country house in the environs, 
and of late even this amount of exertion had become 
distasteful to her. It would have been out of the 
question for her in her present condition to encounter 
the fatigues of travelling. 

With the advance of winter (1775-6) her sufferings 
manifestly increased. "I am so cold, so cold," she 
writes. " My thermometer is twenty degrees below 
that of Reaumur," and again. " I am freezing, shiver- 
ing, dying of cold. ... It is a perpetual state of 
torture." To anyone in this abnormal condition of 
chilliness, the Parisian winter must have been a severe 
trial indeed, both as regards the rigors of the atmos- 
phere, and the very inadequate precautions taken 
against them. We remember Horace Walpole's lively 
description of how it struck a contemporary. 

" Lapland is the torrid zone in comparison with 
Paris. We have had such a frost this fortnight," he 
caustically proceeds, " that I went nine miles to dine 
in the country to-day, in a villa exactly like a green- 
house, except that there was no fire but in one room. 
. . . We dined in a paved hall painted in fresco, with 
a fountain at one end ; for in this country they live in 
a perpetual opera, and persist in being young when 



326 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

they are old, and hot when they are frozen. ... I am 
come home, and blowing my billets^ between every para- 
graph, yet can scarce move my fingers." And again : 
" we were two-and-twenty at the Marechale de Luxem- 
bourg's, and supped in a temple rather than in a hall. 
It is vaulted at top with gods and goddesses, and 
paved with marble ; but the god of fire was not of the 
number." 

Such would be the state of things encountered by 
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse every time she stirred 
from her own small, and therefore comparatively cozy, 
rooms, where we may hope that respectable fires were 
kept burning. To make the matter worse, it appears 
that she, like most ladies of that period, wore practi- 
cally no clothing underneath. A muslin petticoat lined 
with cotton wool is the nearest approach to a warm 
inner garment that I have been able to discover in 
the inventory of her wardrobe. On the other hand, 
furs for outdoor wear were extremely popular, with both 
sexes, and with these she was well provided. Several 
mantles and pelisses of satin lined with ermine and 
silver-fox, and muffs ^ of blue fox, grebe, cock's feathers, 
and sable figure in the catalogue so often referred to. 

Meanwhile Guibert, who, partly through the interest 
of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, had obtained what we 
should call a War Office appointment, was settled for 
the winter in Paris, along with his wife and her family. 
During these last sad months, he appears, it must be 

1 Fire-logs. 

^ Muffs were then carried by gentlemen as well as ladies. Mademoiselle 
de Lespinasse sent one as a present to Guibert, who made the not very 
delicate remark that it must have been expensive, and that therefore he 
ought either to decline or pay for it ! " For shame," she replied. " You 
may be quite sure / should not give it you if it were expensive. Lest you 
should perish from cold as well as shame, I send it you back for your 
dinner-party to-day." 



REQUIESCAT 327 

owned, to more advantage than usual. At the out- 
set, indeed, he showed himself entirely ready to forget 
his obligations to the fair and gentle girl who had 
given her life into his keeping, but Julie de Lespinasse 
was resolute that such a wrong should not happen 
through her, and when he realised this a new 
reverence appeared in his attitude towards her. 
Henceforth, his behaviour is that of a devoted and 
respectful friend. It is true that at first he hurt her 
deeply by his inability to recognise how desperate was 
her physical condition. Like Mrs Dombey's sister- 
in-law, he seems to have urged upon her the necessity 
of "making an effort." Her reply has all the irrita- 
bility of a justly outraged invalid. 

" My dear friend, you are really splendid at giving 
advice, and whether it is from sympathy, or because 
my sufferings bore you, I cannot possibly do better, 
as you say, than try to follow it. You treat my cough, 
my loss of flesh, my sleeplessness, my internal troubles 
as if they were mere fine ladies' fancies, such as 
wearing a pagoda on your head or walking on one 
heel. You would like to cure me by moral treatment. 
My dear friend, how young you must be ! For I 
do not like to say that you are very cold and indiffer- 
ent. Believe me, neither my own will, nor anything 
in nature could save me now. No, not the resurrec- 
tion of M. de Mora, the highest good that I can 
imagine, could change my fate." 

Guibert's best excuse for this apparent want of 
feeling is contained in his own words, written immedi- 
ately after Julie's death : 

''She was so active, so animated, so much alive! 



328 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

Alas ! for the last two years, it was her mind which 
deceived my anxieties, and laid my fears to sleep. 
Every day, I saw her grow paler and weaker. But 
her intellect had never been so brilliant, her affections 
never so active. ' She cannot, cannot be dying ! ' I 
said to myself, each time I took leave of her. So 
much life should surely be proof against death, and I 
could as soon have imagined the extinction of the sun 
as the decease of Eliza.^" 

Others besides Guibert testify to this remarkable 
activity of intellect maintained almost to the very last. 
" You would still find her interesting and animated in 
the midst of her sufferings and of her daily increasing 
weakness," writes Morellet, two months before her 
death, to her English admirer, Lord Shelburne. And 
her own letters contain abundant evidence of the 
interest which she still felt in her friends and every- 
thing concerning them. For one (M. de Saint Cha- 
mans) she exerts herself to procure an exemption from 
military duty, essential, as she thinks, if his life is 
to be saved. Another (Lomenie de Brienne) has 
symptoms which alarm her, and she anxiously cross- 
examines Bordeu as to the real chances of his 
recovery. She writes the most shrewd and sound 
advice to Guibert in regard to his bearing towards his 
official superiors, with whom he seems much inclined 
to quarrel. The melancholy condition of Madame 
Geoffrin, who had temporarily rallied from an attack 
of paralysis destined within two years to prove fatal, 
affects her with an emotion beyond the power of her own 
sufferings to produce. "It was a pleasure mixed with 

1 This absurd pseudonym is borrowed from Eliza Draper, the beloved 
of Sterne. 



REQUIESCAT 329 

pain to see her once more. Ah ! she grieved me 
deeply, for I seemed to see her death nearer at hand 
than my own. I could not restrain my tears in her 
presence, I was heartbroken." 

Till within two or three months of the end, she 
endeavoured to continue her ordinary course of life, 
receiving her circle in the evenings, and "dragging 
herself" (the phrase is her own) to social gatherings, 
where, as she says, she sometimes coughed to such an 
extent as to deafen the whole company. But at last 
she became unable to leave her own rooms, or to see 
anyone but a few chosen friends. Guibert was of 
the number. His anxieties were at last thoroughly 
aroused, and no mark of attention or solicitude was 
wanting on his part. He put aside his official duties 
whenever they would have interfered with his daily 
visits to the invalid ; he confided to her his most secret 
literary projects ; he ran to and fro on her errands, 
spending hours in arranging for a change of house 
desired by her, though doubtless he knew all along 
that she was far too weak ever to carry out this last 
pathetic caprice. Some of his expressions seem in- 
deed to indicate that his shallow, self-centred nature 
was stirred to an altogether unwonted depth, and that 
he now, for the first time, realised how much the dying 
woman had been to him. " I must say it," he writes, 
" because when I search my own heart I find that 
such is my innermost thought — if I had to choose 
between the loss of you and of everyone else that I 
know, I should not hesitate ! " 

The poor sufferer could not but be soothed by his 
tenderness, but the conviction (no doubt well founded) 
that his grief would not be of long duration imparts 
a certain sad irony to her gratitude for these tardy 



330 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

marks of affection. " You are the most kind-hearted, | 
and most light-minded of men," she writes to him, 
on hearing that he has sent twice during one night 
to inquire for her. " But, once more, I entreat you 
to be calm. You will only increase my sufferings." 
To be permitted to depart in peace is now her one 
prevailing desire, and she ceases not to look forward 
longingly to her deliverance from a life which had 
grown insupportably weary. 

The end came on the morning of May the 2 2nd.^ 
For some days before, Guibert was forbidden to 
enter her room, but could not tear himself from the 
house, and passed all his spare time in d'Alembert's 
apartment upstairs, plunged in a frenzy of grief The 
dying woman's face had been distorted by a nervous 
convulsion of unusual severity, and she could not 
endure the thought that such an element of horror 
and grotesqueness should be imparted to his last im- 
pression of her. But those two faithful friends, of 
whom she had formerly said that they were to her 
"as a part of herself," d'Alembert and Condorcet,^ 
were permitted to remain with her to the end. There 
was another watcher by the bed of death— her brother, 
Abel de Vichy, the only one of all her kin who had 
not been a good deal less than kind in his dealings 
with her. As a loyal Catholic was bound to do, he 
urged upon her the duty of reconciliation — even at 
this eleventh hour — with the Church, and a passage 
in one of his letters, quoted by the Marquis de 
Segur, records that his efforts were crowned with 

^ 1776. 

2 Turgot had been dismissed from office ten days before her death, but 
she was then probably too far gone to realise this catastrophe, which 
meant the undoing of all his noble work. 



REqUIESCAT 331 

success.^ " She received the last sacraments," he says, 
" in despite of all the powers of the Encyclopedia " {i.e. 
of d'Alembert and Condorcet), and passed away " in a 
most Christian frame of mind." I leave it to the 
reader to determine whether it is more likely that 
she could, on half-an-hour's persuasion, so far depart 
from the convictions of a lifetime as to accept, en masse, 
the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church (for that 
is what the word Christian would have implied both 
to Abel and to her), or that, with her usual averseness 
to giving pain, she shrank from wounding the honest 
and good heart which was concerned for her eternal 
welfare. Yet, in truth, it would not be difficult to 
explain her action without resorting to either alter- 
native. Few people then cared to brave the penalties 
of dying excommunicated, and we have no reason to 
think that Julie de Lespinasse, even setting aside 
the intervention of Abel, would have been among 
the number. She had never ceased to hear Mass on 
Sundays, and when special services were instituted, 
on the occasion of a jubilee, she had to a certain 
extent attended them. Several times in her letters 
she represents herself, in the most natural manner, 
as looking forward to her last resting-place at St 
Sulpice — her parish church. It is probable that, in 
her heart of hearts, she still retained a vague yearning 
affection for the faith of her childhood, and could not 
endure the thought of cutting herself adrift from all 
its hallowed associations. 

It would have been impossible for d'Alembert to 
approve this act of submission to the ecclesiastical 
authority, but it does not appear that he opposed that 

1 The expenses of the administration of the Sacraments are duly noted 
among the claims on the deceased's estate. 



332 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

strenuous resistance by which, in the case of Madame 
Geoffrin, he afterwards, not much to his honour, 
distinguished himself. His whole energies, in truth, 
were absorbed by that approaching sorrow which 
was to leave him, as he expressed it, " alone in the 
universe." The agony of parting was still further 
enhanced by that miserable atmosphere of misunder- 
standing which, for several years back, had embittered 
his relations with the dying woman. It is true that 
there had been many intervals in which the old tender- 
ness had seemed on her side to revive in all its former 
fulness. "There is no one I care for more than for 
you, no one so necessary to my happiness, no one else 
for whose sake I wish to live," she had said to him 
ten months before her death, when the reaction pro- 
duced by Guibert's marriage was at its height. And 
a few months later she had assured him with a sigh : 
"You are the only person I ever loved who has not 
made me unhappy." Undoubtedly these words ex- 
pressed the conviction of her calmer moments, but 
when the tide of misery swept back over her she was 
unable, though she often struggled hard, to control her 
temper, and in the unreasoning irritability of bodily 
and mental disease poor d'Alembert saw only aversion 
to himself. He racked his brains to discover what 
ground for resentment he could possibly have given 
her, and amongst other strange conjectures, imagined 
that she suspected him, of all men, of leading an im- 
moral life ! Repeatedly, he was on the point of asking 
her for an explanation, but she seemed to shrink from 
anything approaching a scene, and the fear that 
agitation might be dangerous for her restrained him 
from speaking. 

But on Julie's side no self-deception existed. She 



REQUIESCAT ^o,^, 

knew well that the blame of their estrangement 
rested with her, and not with him, and on the night 
of her death she gathered together her remaining 
strength to implore his forgiveness for all the wrong 
that she had done him, all the pain that she had 
brought him. A torrent of heartfelt assurances 
rushed immediately to his lips, but this last effort 
had so exhausted her failing forces that she was 
unable any longer to understand what was said, and 
he ever afterwards cherished the agonising conviction 
that she had died believing herself unforgiven. 

For some hours after she lay in a state of semi- 
unconsciousness. Once, she raised her head, and 
looking around her said with an air of surprise : ** Am 
I still alive ? " They were her last words. At two in 
the morning she passed away, apparently without pain. 

The funeral took place next day at St Sulpice, 
d'Alembert and Condorcet being chief mourners. By 
her own express wish, the last observances were 
rendered in very simple fashion and a hideous 
custom ^ then prevalent, of laying out the dead in 
front of their homes, as a spectacle for all who passed 
by, was omitted. 

Her will, written with her own hand three months 
previously, has an individuality rarely found in such 
documents, and the spirit in which all its provisions 
are conceived and expressed, helps us to understand 
why this woman was beloved beyond the ordinary 
measure of humanity. D'Alembert is appointed 
executor in these terms. 

*' I beg M. d'Alembert, in the name of the friend- 

1 Mercier alludes to this practice with disapproval in his "Tableau de 
Paris." 



334 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

ship which he has always shown me, to have the kind- 
ness to execute this will. ... I entreat his pardon a 
thousand times for all the trouble that I shall give 
him, but I beg him, in matters of detail, to leave as 
much as possible of the work to others." 

The first legacies recorded are to her servants. 
Her maid, " who has been with me a long time, and 
who gives me great satisfaction," has all her mistress' 
wardrobe, and is besides residuary legatee.^ The 
footman receives two years' wages, ^ his clothes and 
his bed. A poor charwoman, "of whom I am fond," 
has thirteen pounds, and a similar sum is left to her 
young son, who had likewise been employed in the 
establishment. Their legacies are to be paid them as 
soon as possible, ''because they are in want." 

Then follow the bequests to intimate friends, acquir- 
ing a peculiar value by the tact and grace with 
which they are in each case adapted to the recipient. 
Guibert is to have all her English books. Condorcet, 
the busts of Voltaire and d'Alembert, and such of her 
engravings as he cares to select. Madame de Saint 
Chamans, her rosewood dressing-table. " I hope 
that, as I had it in constant use, it will sometimes 
serve to recall my affection for her." Madame 
Geoffrin, " who is so dear to me, and has lavished 
such kindness upon me," is entreated to accept her 
little marble bird with the pedestal of beaten gold. 
To Dr Roux, her physician in ordinary, "who has 
shown me so much kindness and attention," she 
bequeaths her watch and clock, "as a very slight 

1 The cook had been in the service of the deceased for only a fortnight 
at the time of her death. Hence, doubtless, the omission of her name. 

^ One year's wages by the will, and another by verbal direction of the 
deceased to d'Alembert. 



REQUIESCAT ss5 

token of my gratitude." To d'Alembert, "as a token 
of my affectionate friendship," her " rosewood writing- 
desk with its marble stand, a great rosewood cabinet 
where I keep my books, and a rosewood chiffonniere 
with nine drawers, I have heard him say that he Hked 
to have many drawers." 

The will was supplemented by a sealed letter 
addressed to d'Alembert, and dated a week before her 
death. It begins with these pathetic words : 

" I owe everything to you. I am so confident of 
your affection that I mean to employ all the strength 
left me to endure a life which no longer allows me 
anything to hope or fear. . . . Yet, as I cannot feel 
sufficiently sure of my own will, and it might easily 
be overcome by despair, I take the precaution of 
writing to beg you to burn, without reading them, all 
the papers which you will find in a large black port- 
folio. I have not the courage to touch them myself. 
It would kill me to see the handwriting of my friend " 
{i.e. Mora). 

Then follow certain business details. She leaves 
behind her only fifty pounds in cash, and out of these 
forty pounds are owing to d'Alembert himself, but 
several of her dividends are due, and there will be much 
more than enough to pay her debts and her "little 
legacies." 

The letter ends thus : 

"Farewell, dear friend, do not regret me. Re- 
member that by leaving this life I shall find rest, 
which I could no longer hope for here. . . . Once 
more, forget me. Take care of yourself, life should 
still have interest for you. Your goodness should 



S36 A STAR OF THE SALONS 

bring you happiness. . . . My death is but a proof of 
the love I bore to M. de Mora. His death proves 
but too plainly that he returned it in a way that 
you never imagined. Alas ! when you read this, I 
shall be delivered from the burden that is crushing 
me. . . . Farewell, dear friend, for ever." 

By a clause in the will, d'Alembert, in case her 
debts should exceed her assets, was to apply for help 
to Abel de Vichy, here styled her nephew, but this 
measure, as the testatrix had foreseen, proved alto- 
gether unnecessary. Save for the forty pounds due to 
d'Alembert, her debts were of an unimportant descrip- 
tion. Twenty-five pounds to the cabinetmaker, thir- 
teen to the milliner, four to the chemist, are by far the 
largest items. When her estate was finally wound up, 
and all liabilities had been discharged, a surplus of 
;^430 accrued to the femme -de -cAamdre, her residuary 
legatee, who forthwith purchased a life annuity at ten 
per cent. In view of these circumstances I cannot 
help thinking that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse was 
fairly entitled to the reputation of a good economist 
— a reputation which she greatly coveted, but which 
M. de S^gur — in other respects the most appreciative 
of her biographers — seems inclined to deny her. 

In performing the duties of executor, d'Alembert, 
who appears to have been a good man of business, 
might have found some distraction from his over- 
whelming sorrow ; but, unhappily, those very duties 
led to a discovery which increased it tenfold. He was 
too honourable to examine the letters which he had 
been charged to burn, but there were many manu- 
scripts protected by no such injunction to be looked 
over and classified, and amongst these one, entirely 



REQUIESCAT 337 

in Julie's writing, attracted his attention. He 
opened it with a melancholy interest, but no fore- 
boding of evil, and found that it contained a full 
account of her relations with Mora, ^ their mutual 
passion, and their hopes of union. The allusion in 
her testamentary letter had in no way prepared 
d'Alembert for this disclosure, and the result was at first 
a terrible revulsion of feeling — a sensation of almost 
intolerable wrong. That extraordinary fatality which 
in this matter attended his every action induced him 
to seek for comfort in the sympathy of — the Comte 
de Guibert ! But his strangely chosen confidant 
demeaned himself — on this occasion — like a gentleman, 
and though d'Alembert knew that Mora had been 
preferred to himself he never knew that Guibert had 
been preferred to both. 

It is impossible not to sympathise deeply with the 
man whose heartwhole devotion had received so 
inadequate a return. Yet it is equally impossible to 
feel that, in accepting Mora as a lover, Julie wronged 
d'Alembert otherwise than by withholding from him 
her confidence. And if we consider the anguish 
which such a confidence must inevitably have caused 
him, and her own uncertainty as to whether the 
betrothal would ever result in a marriage, we cannot 
but allow that there was much to excuse her dissimula- 
tion. 

Against Mora himself, on the other hand, her sin, 
as she never failed to recognise, was undoubtedly 
grave. By strict rules of justice, indeed, it must be 
considered the one serious blot upon her character. 

1 This document, to which Madame Suard alludes, had evidently been 
overlooked by Mademoiselle de Lespinasse when making her final 
dispositions. Unhappily it is now impossible to trace it. 
Y 



33^ A STAR OF THE SALONS 

For, as regards the breach of abstract morality, we 
cannot too often remind ourselves that, for a woman 
with her antecedents and environment, the remarkable 
thing is — not that she should have been guilty of it, 
but — that her life should otherwise have been 
irreproachable. 

Yet Julie de Lespinasse never ceased to believe 
that if Mora had lived to know all he would have 
forgiven her. D'Alembert, we know, did live to 
forgive her. So much is plain from those heart- 
broken outpourings ^ which show him, amid his bitter 
disillusionment, still clinging to the belief that, could 
she have realised his readiness to pardon all, she 
might, at long last, have learned to love him as he 
loved her. Surely, then, it is scarcely for us to be 
severe in condemning her. 

Across the interveningr aulf of over a hundred 
years, her unique and fascinating personality pleads 
with us on her behalf, as it pleaded then even with 
those who had suffered through her fault. We find 
in her some things which we needs must blame, but 
far more to be admired, pitied, and loved. 

1 " Aux Manes de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse,'- and "Sur la Tombe 
de Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.'- 



INDEX 



ACADEMIE FRANgAISE, I4I-I43, 
188,313,314 

Aisse, Mademoiselle, 26, 43 {note)^ 

94-97, 1 01 
D'Albert, Mademoiselle, writes a 

society novel while still a girl at 

school, 45, 55 
D'Albon, Camille de, 2, 4, 7-10,43, 

52, 65-67, 69, 70, 234 
D'Albon, Comtesse de, i-io 
D'Alembert, possible origin of 

name, 114 {note) 
D'Alembert, Jean, 

Exposed on the steps of St Jean 
le Rond, 109 

His education, 110-113 

Sub-editor of Encyclopedia, 113, 

m, 145 

Friendship with Madame du 
Deffand, 115 

Introduction to Julie de Lespin- 
asse, 86, 119 

Favours Italian miisic, 128 

His theological attitude, 134-136, 
141, 149 

Defends the stage against Rous- 
seau, 145, 147, 148 

Quarrels with Madame du Def- 
fand over The Philosophers, 
162 

His visit to Prussia, 125, 175, 176 

Sides with Julie in her quarrel 
with Madame du Deffand, 
183 

Rumours of his marriage, 187, 
188, 208 

Dangerously ill, 203 

339 



Takes rooms in the same house 

with Julie, 206 
Writes to Julie's dictation, 227, 

231 
Anxious for Mora's recovery, 263, 

275, 276 
Regrets the absence of Guibert, 

307, 308 
His agony of sorrow at Julie's 

death, 332 
Appointed her executor, 2)2)2> 
Discovers her love for Mora, 337 
Lives to forgive her, 338 
D'Anlezy, Comte, 103, 105 
D'Aranda, Count, 219, 242 
Aubyn, Felicite de Saint- (see 

Madame de Genlis). 
Avauges, Chateau de, 2, 5 
D'Aydie, Chevalier, 94-99, T07 



B 



Beggars under Ancien Regime, 

38, 39, 57 
Bellechasse, Rue, 193, 194 {note\ 199 
Bleeding, 212, 250, 262, 276 {note), 

323, 324 
Bolingbroke, Lady, 96 
Bordeu, Doctor, 20, 324, 325, 328 
BoufBers, Comtesse de, 219, 309 

{note) 
Boufflers, Duchesse de, 210 {note) 
BufFon, 134, 135, 140, 141 



Champrond, Chateau de, : i 
Chastellux, Chevalier de, 179, 215, 
3 1 1 {note) 



340 



A STAR OF THE SALONS 



Chatelet, Madame du, 14, 49 
Chatillon, Madame de, 182, 190, 

199, 219, 225 
Clairon, Mademoiselle, 151-156, 

158, 160 
"Clarissa," Richardson's, 56, 139, 

140 
College des Quatre Nations, 112, 

120, 133, 313 {7tote) 
Comedie Frangaise, 126, 148, 150, 

152, 154, i55> 156, 158 
Comte, Rue Michel le,'i 18, 204, 205, 

206 
Condorcet, Marquis de, 219, 225- 

234, 251, 253, 255, 256, 261, 262, 

294, 295, 299, 330, 331, 333, 334 
Convents, usefulness of, 53-60 
Conversation, general, a lost art, 

221 
Courcelles, Mademoiselle de 

(Madame de Guibert), 300-304, 

316 



D'Epinay, Madame, 15, 16 
D'Epinay, Mousieur, 13 
D'Ette, Mademoiselle, 190 



Farines, Guerre de (Corn Law 
riots) 296-299 

Fashions in dress and hair arrange- 
ment, 23, 46, 85, 123, 155, 200, 
201, 217, 319 

Ferriol, Madame de, 95, 96, loi 

Ferriol, Monsieur de, 95, 96 

Frederic of Prussia, 121, 122, 125, 
175, 176, 258, 259, 273 

Fronsac, de (son of the Due de 
Richelieu), 20, 21, iii 

Fuentes, Count de, 240, 241, 248, 
249, 250, 280, 281 



D 



Deffand, Madame du, 45-52, 

61-72, 76-83. 87, 88, 92,93, 115, 

116, 117-120, 162-164, 169-186, 

189, 208, 295 
Delaunay, Mademoiselle (Madame 

de Staal) 26, 29, 49, 59, 60, 239, 
Destouches, Chevalier, the father 

of d'Alembert, 109, no, 112 
Devreux (femme de chambre), 76, 

84, 165 
Diderot, 106, 113, 127, 136, 137, 145, 

146, 156, 157, 158, 161 
Dinners, 30, 31, 32, 118, 214, 215, 

216 
Dominique, Rue St, 76, 193, 194 



E 



Encyclopedia, 113- 115, 126, 127, 
136, 137, 138, 141-146 



Gabelle (salt tax) 37, 38 

Geneva, 144 

Genlis, Madame de (Felicitd de 

Saint- Aubyn), 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 

20, 21, 23, 25, 30, zz, 34, 36, 55, 

59, 85, 107, 314 
Geoffrin, Madame, 115, 191, 192, 

198, 199, 202, 206, 215, 216, 217, 

225, 328, 332, 334 
Gluck, 131 {note) 
Graffigny, Madame de, 288 
Greuze, 195, 300, 315 
Grimm, 15, 45, 102, 127, 128, 130, 

131, 215, 218, 220, 221, 227 
Guibert, Comte de, 

His essay on Tactics, 258, 259 

First impressions of Julie de 
Lespinasse, 260 

His foreign tour, 266-272 

In love with Julie, 273 

Tells her he must marry money, 
283, 285 



INDEX 



341 



Guibert, Comte de — continued 
Betrothed to Mademoiselle de 

Courcelles, 300 
Marriage, 303 

His essay on Catinat, 311, 312 
His play The Constable, 316- 

321 
Deeply moved by Julie's d6ath, 

327-330 
Keeps the secret of theirintimacy, 

275, 282 {note\ 337 
His eulogium on her, 14, 260 



H 



Helvetius, Madame, 288, 289 
Hdnault, President, 47, 48, 50, 79, 

85, 86, 88 to 94, IDS, 106, 107, 

114, 115, 119, 121, 131, 142, i43j 

189, 190 
Henry, Monsieur Charles, 271 
Holbach, 215, 216 {note) 
Hume, David, 15, 207, 209 {note\ 

212, 219 



I 



Inoculation in England and 
France, 210, 211, 236 



J 



Joseph, Convent of St, 76, 78, 
199 



La Harpe, 171, 223, 233, 234, 312, 

313 
Lauzun, Due de, 15, 17, 20, 211 
Lecouvreur, Adrienne, 149, 150, 

151 
Lespinasse, origin of name, 5 



Lespinasse, Julie de 

Birth and parentage, i, 4, 5 
Education, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 17, 

18 
Experience as governess at 

Champrond, 1 1 et seq. 
Makes acquaintance with Ma- 
dame du Deffand, 51 et seq. 
Boarder in a convent at Lyon, 

^1 et seq. 
Painful interview with her 

brother, 69, 234 
Arrives in Paris, 76 
Routine of her life with Madame 

du Deffand, ^Z et seq. 
Beginning of her friendship with 

d'Alembert, 107, 108, 119 120, 

131 

Her literary tastes, 140, 141, 228 

Her tact in dealing with Ma- 
dame du Deffand's servants 
and relations, 165 et seq. 

In love with an Irishman, 170 
et seq. 

Widening breach between her 
and Madame du Deffand, 173 
et seq. 

Final rupture, 181 

Establishes a salon of her own, 
189 et seq. 

Her income and expenditure, 192 
et seq. 

Joint establishment with d'Alem- 
bert, 205 et seq. 

Ill with small-pox, 210 et seq. 

Admitted to Madame Geoffrin's 
dinners, 216 

Her management of her salon, 
218 et seq. 

Her friendship with Condorcet, 
226 et seq. 

First meeting with Mora, 243 

Betrothal, 245 et seq. 

Growing estrangement from 
d'Alembert, 252 et seq. 

Introduced to Guibert, 260 . 



342 



A STAR OF THE SALONS 



Lespinasse, Julie de — continued 

Her 'first letter' \.o\\\it\^7.6'] et seq. 

Her betrayal of Mora, 274, 275 

Attempts suicide, 279 

Seeks a wife for Guibert, 284 

Meets Lord Shelburne, 292 etseq. 

Her sympathy with Turgot, 298 
et seq. 

Introduced to Guibert's fiancee, 
302 

His marriage her death-blow, 306 

Criticises his essay on Catinat, 
311, 312 

Advises him about his play The 
Constable^ 317, 321 

Her gradual decline, 322 et seq. 

Receives the last sacraments, 331 

Her death, 330 

Her will, ■^■})2) ^i ^^Q- 
Louis XV., 141, 152, 286 
Louis XVL, 286, 290, 291, 297, 298, 

320 
Luxembourg, Marechale de, 99, 

100, loi, 105, 107, 175, 189, 190, 



326 



M 



Maine, Duchesse du, 48, 49 
Maintenon, Madame de, 46, 57, 73 
Marie Antoinette, 286, 317, 319, 

320 
Marmontel, 56, 72)j 74? 106, iii, 

120 {jiote), 154, 156, 179, 188 

{note), 205, 207, 215, 216, 220, 

223, 227, 238, 247, 253 {note\ 255 
Mercier (" Tableau de Paris "), 123, 

124, 197, 333 i^iote) 
Mistress, meaning of the word, 207 

{a7zd note) 
Montesquieu, 53, 134, 135, 140 
Montsauge, Madame de, 264, 270, 

271, 272, 282, 283 
Mora, Marquis de 

Marriage, 240 

A widower, 241 



Mora, Marquis de — continued 
Meets Julie de Lespinasse, 243 
Attacked by hemorrhage of the 

lungs, 249 
Parts for the last time with Julie, 

250 
At home in Madrid, 262 et seq., 

273 
Sets out for Paris and dies at 

Bordeaux, 277, 278 
Must in any case have died of 

consumption, 280 
Julie writes to him after his 

death, 308 
Morellet, Abbe, 74, 159, 160, 162, 

238, 286, 287, 289 
Music (French v. Italian), 1 27-131 



N 



Necker, Madame, 83, 206, 215 



Palissot, Charles, 158-160, 162, 

163 
Paris (in eighteenth century), 122- 

125, 193, 197, 198 
Phlipon, Manon (Madame Roland), 

II, 14, 16, 18, 20, 57, 59,63, 199, 

297, ^n 

Pierre, Bernadin de Saint, 223 
Pompadour, Madame de, 17, 129, 

^2P, 131 
Pont de Veyle, loi, 102, 103, 106 



R 



RoBECQ, Madame de, 157-160, 

162, 163 
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 20, 21, 22, 

24, 2,% 99, loi, 127, 128, 129, 139, 

140, 145, 147, 153,207,222 
Rousseau, Madame (d'Alembert's 

nurse), 109, no, 113, 205, 206 



INDEX 



343 



Salon (held at Louvre in eigh- 
teenth century), 314 

Segur, Marquis de (quoted), 4, 6, 
II, 43, 50, 60, 170, 172, 199, 200, 
206, 208, 209 {note)^ 235, 239, 
243, 244, 248, 250, 253, 264, 269, 

273, 311, 317, 330, 336 
Shelburne, Lord, 219, 292, 293, 

294 
Smallpox (one Frenchwoman in 

four disfigured by), 210 
Suard, 225, 226, 227, 229 
Suard, Madame, 200 {note)^ 202, 

225, 226, 229, 337 {note) 



Taaffe, Mr, 169-172, 177, 209 

Taille, the, 37, 38 

Tencin, Cardinal de, 62, 67, 72, 73, 

109 
Tencin, Madame de (d'Alembert's 

mother), 108-111, 191 
Terray, Abbe, 290 
Tronchin, Doctor, 210, 211, 212 
Turgot, 34, 179, 190, 219, 220, 225, 

226, 227, 287-292, 294-299, 330 

{note) 



U 

D'UssE, Mademoiselle, 230, 231 
D'Usse, Marquis, 103, 105, 190 

V 

Vichy, Abel de, 12, 29 {note), 51, 
166-169, "^li, 1S9, 234-237, 324, 
330,331, 336 

Vichy, Diane de, 6, 7, 10. 11, 12, 19, 

29,32,33,43,44, 51. 52, 57, 65, 

167, 235 
Vichy, Gaspard de, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 

12, 28, 33, 41-44, 50-52, 65-67, 

166, 167, 169, 189, 235 
Villa- Hermosa, Duke de, 246, 248, 

263, 264 
Voltaire, 49, 87, 93, 97, 107, 128, 

143, 144, 148, 149, 150, 152, 155, 

162, 163, 176, 187, 188, 204, 205, 

208, 248, 256, 259 

W 

Walpole, Horace, 90, 102, 107, 

295, 325, 326 
Watelet, 204, 260 



Young, Arthur, 30, 32, ^i, 74- 
76, 122, 123, 180, 212 



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